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THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


BOOKS BY 

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK 


Alias Red Ryan 
A Gentleman in Pajamas 
A Pagan of the Hills 
Destiny 

The Battle Cry 

The Call of the Cumberlands 

The Code of the Mountains 

The Key to Yesterday 

The Lighted Match 

The Portal of Dreams 

The Rogue’s Badge 

The Roof Tree 

The Tempering 

The Tyranny of Weakness 

When Bear Cat Went Dry 





‘the 

ROGUE’S BADGE 

BY 

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK , 



GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1924 



















COPYRIGHT, 1923,1924, BY 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
AT 

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 

First Edition 

SEP 25 ”24 • 


©Cl A SO 1995 O 

. . \ 





THE ROGUE’S BADGE 







THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


CHAPTER I 


THE light-coloured, full-bodied elderly 



Negro who had been standing near the 


-*• palings of the backstretch slipped his stop¬ 
watch into his pocket and turned away, he was 
hardly conscious that he sighed or what submerged 
echo of melancholy made him sigh. 

It was an April morning with an early, yet confi¬ 
dent declaration of spring in the air which found 
voice in the palpitant full-throatedness of yellow¬ 
breasted larks and more practical confirmation in 
the tightening up of preliminary gallops to the earn¬ 
estness of workouts. 

But the Negro sighed, and he did so because he 
was half conscious of Time’s contrasts. He was 
now a trainer on the down slope of his years and he 
could not entirely forget that when he too had been 
in his spring he had dominated moments which 
white men and rich men had coveted. 

He had been a wisp of a black boy then with a 
gift of magic in his hands and head. Instead of 


2 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

standing on the ground and “clocking” preparatory 
gallops between sunrise and mid-morning, he had 
worn silks in those times and had felt his heart leap 
with quick excitement of backstretch and finish. In 
a fashion he had also made history in those days, 
for though he had been born just at the end of 
slavery, he had ridden the incomparable Ten Broeck 
in all his races against time. He had brought him 
romping victoriously home in that struggle which 
will remain unforgettable while blood-horses are 
bred and raced—the four-mile heat in which the 
Harper stallion distanced Molly McCarthy, the 
mare that was backed by the strong pride of the 
West. Then not to have known the name of Billy 
Moseby would have been not to know the American 
turf, and the coloured boy had tasted the savour of 
heady triumphs. Then—and it had been here on 
this same track at Churchill Downs—old Frank 
Harper had run about in a daze of exultation crying 
out in a piping shrillness, “Gentlemen, I run my 
horse from eend to eend! Yes, Sirs, I run him 
from eend to eend and that boy’s the best in the 
country!” 

This morning, with the Derby still six weeks dis¬ 
tant, a hundred or more railbirds had gathered in 
the early chill of morning to watch the workouts of 
possible contenders, and to many of them the man 
who in other years had piloted the mighty son of 
Phaeton was a figure of forgotten importance. In 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


3 

this place just now two purposes were being served: 
the effort to keep training secrets and the counter 
effort to penetrate them. 

Despite their laconic and almost stolid seeming, 
these onlookers were touched with passion—the 
passion to garner advance information that would 
profit them thereafter. They sought to build against 
the day, a few weeks hence, when the “iron men,” 
as they called the pari mutuels in the betting en¬ 
closure, should pay dividends on sound racing judg¬ 
ment. 

And contrariwise the trainers who came from the 
stables in the wake of gingerly dancing colts and 
fillies sought to keep “bottled up” what answers 
their charges might give to questions—put to them 
in categorical terms of test—of speed and stamina. 
In consequence they made large and casual pretense 
that this morning nothing was to be expected except 
joint-limberings and pipe-openers. That same pre¬ 
tense characterized every other morning and de¬ 
ceived no one. 

“I guess that about concludes the performance, 
eh Billy?” inquired a slender young man whose wad 
of copy paper proclaimed him a sporting reporter. 
“I’m not taking back much news to town but I see 
you’re parking the clock—and when you do that I 
can usually go home feeling that there’s nothing 
more to wait for.” 

The coloured man nodded. “There ain’t been 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


4 

much worth gettin’ up early to watch this morninY* 
he acceded, “and now it’s gettin’ on to be late. I 
reckon they’re callin’ it a day.” 

They turned together toward the gate, then the 
coloured man halted as suddenly as though he had 
encountered a rattlesnake in his path and his eyes 
kindled into such expectant interest that the sport¬ 
ing writer followed their gaze. He saw two horses 
coming, freshly saddled, on to the track with boys 
crouchitig over their withers, and something in the 
Negro’s absorption carried a sense of significance 
for their appearance. 

The crowd had dwindled now from several scores 
to a corporal’s guard of track regulars. The sun 
was high and the morning’s work presumably over, 
but the old-time jockey’s hand felt again for his 
stop-watch. 

“Not quite done yet, after all, Billy,” murmured 
the newspaper man. “Colonel Parrish is slipping 
his Derby starter out on the track after most of 
the railbirds have flown home. Now he’s going 
to set him down for a stiff breezing or I miss my 
guess.” 

But the coloured man said nothing. He was not 
looking at Chimney Swift, the handsome blood bay 
which was nominated to carry the Parrish colours 
in the mightily coveted Kentucky Derby. His eyes 
instead dwelt fixedly on the young brown stallion 
that danced delicately along at his side. After a 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


5 

moment he prompted in a low voice: “Come along, 
sir. Let’s you an’ me sa’nter off by ourselves. I’ve 
got a hunch that this ain’t goin’ to be no Derby 
workout after all.” 

The reporter lifted his brows in surprise but put 
no question until they had passed beyond ear shot 
of the little group that still lingered about the back- 
stretch. Then he turned inquiringly: “What do you 
mean—not Derby work?” he demanded. “That’s 
the Parrish starter and that’s Snip Button, the Par¬ 
rish jockey, with a leg-up, isn’t it?” 

The coloured man nodded but offered no reply, 
while his eyes dwelt with the shrewd light of in¬ 
terest on the brown horse. 

“What’s the brown?” demanded the writer. 
“Some old sprinter they’re sending along as pace¬ 
maker, I suppose. I don’t recognize him.” 

“No, sir, neither do I. That’s what’s set me to 
studyin’.” 

“Studying? I don’t get you.” 

The coloured man’s voice took on a vibrance of 
enthusiasm. 

“Listen to me, Mr. Burtley,” he said, speaking 
rapidly. “I ain’t never seen that brown stud-hoss 
before—but I’m a right ole hand at this game. 
There’s some sires that just naturally print their 
names an’ trade-marks on their get. Sometimes it’s 
the way a colt carries his ears—sometimes it’s the 
fashion he handles hisself. But that colt comes 


6 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

straight down the line from old Phaeton hisself or 
I’m badly fooled. Just cast your eye over him, sir. 
You’re lookin’ at a hoss!” 

The two colts were standing side by side now and 
their boys were leaning forward as Parrish in¬ 
structed them in a low voice. 

“The Derby starter’s what everybody’s watchin’.” 
went on Billy Moseby sagely. “That’s the only 
way Colonel Parrish would ever have any chanc’t 
at all to slip the other fellow out on to the track 
without every clock snappin’ on him—an’ like as not 
this is his first workout off the farm. Did you ever 
see a purtier thing than that brown baby? Of 
course he ain’t no old sprinter with a fast quarter 
left in him. He’s a two-year-old.” 

Burtley laughed his skepticism. 

“I usually trail along with you, Billy, when you 
lead the way,” he observed. “But look at that 
growth: look at the bone development: look at the 
height of the horse, man! Why he stands sixteen 
hands if he’s an inch. That’s no baby. He’s mature 
—three years at least!” 

The coloured man shook his head stubbornly and 
his words were more convincing than his gesture. 

“I just told you I never saw that colt before,” he 
said shortly. “An’ there ain’t no three-year-olds 
racin’ that I ain’t seen.” 

The blood bay and the brown turned and walked 
away, soon to break into a slow jog; then into an 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


7 

easy canter, but only two pairs of eyes dwelt with 
the brown, ridden by an unknown stable boy. 
Those were the eyes of the white reporter and the 
Negro trainer. The rest followed Chimney Swift 
and the well-known jockey who rode him. 

“See that?” ejaculated Moseby excitedly, when, 
across the track, they turned into the stretch. “That 
boy on the brown pulled back an’ took the rail. 
They don’t take a pacemaker to the rail and give 
the speed merchant outside, do they? Now they’ll 
break in front of the stand.” 

As he spoke the bay colt, entered for the Ken¬ 
tucky and Latonia Derbies and for other rich stakes, 
plunged from his canter into the catapulting fury 
of his racing stride, and stop-watches clicked in 
ragged unevenness. 

The timers were caught napping since the two 
colts had already passed the pole from which a 
Derby worker might have been expected to start 
his run. 

One watch had not yet clicked and that was Billy 
Moseby’s but two fifths of a second later it started, 
too, for the brown, left far behind by the bay’s ex¬ 
plosive getaway, had burst from his sedate gallop 
into an eruptive swirl of speed and had set sail for 
the leader. 

“They don’t usually break with a pacemaker lay- 
in’ behind the hoss he’s workin’ with,” observed the 
coloured man drily. “An’ I’ll make you another 


8 THE ROGUES BADGE 

bet. I’m the only man here, excusin’ Colonel Par¬ 
rish hisself, that caught the time on the brown when 
he got away. That boy broke slow with him a’ 
purpose to fool the clocks!” 

Tom Burtley was bending forward. Toward 
the first turn came the fleetly flying pair, the bay and 
the brown, and over their shoulders crouched the 
boys, hand-riding, giving both mounts every ounce 
of support that lay in their educated powers. 

“The Derby colt ain’t bein’ held under wraps,” 
almost whispered Moseby. “He’s doin’ the best 

he knows how—an’- My God, white man, look 

a’ thar! He’s goin’ back to the brown a’ready!” 

“They’re stepping along right briskly,” breathed 
the reporter. 

“They’re steppin’ like a house afire!” the coloured 
man snorted. 

“My watch says the brown baby did that eighth 
under twelve flat, an’ he’s just a-breezin’ along with 
his head in the boy’s lap.” 

Around the turn into the backstretch came the 
pair racing now like a yoked team, shoulder to 
shoulder, neck to neck and muzzle to muzzle. The 
brown two-year-old, for all his youth and coltish 
greenness, was the bigger horse and his great stride 
ate distance in easy but mighty bites, while the handi¬ 
cap horse that sought to make the pace gave of his 
best and found himself needing it all. 

As they came thundering down the straightaway, 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


9 

the stable jockey whirled up his bat—let it fall 
sharply once, twice, on the flanks of the Derby 
candidate, until he drew the bay ahead its own 
length to the front, but in a few strides a bronze 
muzzle emerged from that eclipse, then a brown 
throat, a brown neck and a half length of brown 
barrel. It was a hammer-and-tongs tryout of 
speed, and as they swept along the brown crept 
decisively out from behind his straining screen of 
blood bay until open daylight showed between the 
two and the unknown youngster flashed by, with his 
head pulled sideways, still fighting for more run. 

“They went three furlongs,” announced Moseby 
crisply, “and the dockers had their watches sprung 
on the wrong hoss.” 

“What was tht time?” demanded Burtley. “I 
didn’t have my watch out. I relied on you.” 

The coloured trainer met the inquiring eyes po¬ 
litely but he shook his head. 

“I’m mighty sorry, sir,” he said apologetically. 
“But I ain’t a’goin’ to tell you the time.” 

“Not going to tell me? Why?” 

Billy Moseby was gazing with something like 
adoration at the steaming, sweating bodies of the 
two colts, as they came daintily back after being 
pulled down and turned. It was the tribute of a 
judgment seasoned and ripened by many years, but 
while he looked at both animals he thought of only 
one. 


IO THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

“I ain’t goin’ to tell you the time them three 
eighths was worked in,” he answered steadily, “be¬ 
cause if you print it every tout in town’ll know as 
much about that colt as what his own barn knows— 
an’ his barn slipped him out here on the quiet a’pur- 
pose to keep its secret. Let ’em do it, white man, 
let ’em do it!” 

“But-began the news hunter indignantly, 

and the Negro raised a protesting hand. 

“Wait just a minute before you get mad,” he 
urged. “I know it’s your business to get news, an’ 
gen’rally I’m glad to help you, but we’ve seed a 
thing this mornin’ that a man don’t see often in a 
lifetime. We’ve seed a world beater come out on 
a race-track for the first time in his life. . . 

I’ve watched Sysonby run an’ Colin an’ all the rest, 
an’ I rode old Ten Broeck, myself . . . but 

right there stands a hoss that don’t need to take the 
mud from nairy one of ’em, or my name ain’t Billy 
Moseby. Thar stands as good a colt as ever 
looked through a bridle. His first time out, unless 
he goes wrong, he’ll spread-eagle any two-year-old 
field he meets . . . an’ his first time out, every 

horse has the right to speak for hisself.” 

“You mean that if we tip the talent they’ll go 
plunging on him—and make a short price with the 
iron-men?” 

The Negro nodded. “Thar won’t be but just 
one time that that colt can face the flag from under 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


ii 


cover—with a surprise to spring. Let him spring 
it. Let everybody’s eyes pop outen their heads, 
just once. Let his own home folks keep their secret. 
You’ve done seed a hoss make time look foolish 
. . . an’ you forgot to clock him!” 

Tommy Burtley laughed at the heat of the other’s 
ardour. 

“All right, Old Timer,” he agreed. “That’s a 
sporting view to take, and I won’t print anything. 
Let Colonel Parrish keep his horse dark—but for 
my own private information-” 

“Just for yourself,” assented Moseby, readily 
enough, “he stepped them three furlongs in thirty- 
five flat on a dull track—but he didn’t never have to 
extend hisself, an’ he mighty nigh pulled the boy’s 
arms out when he tried to ease him up. Moreover, 
I reckon maybe you didn't notice when they came out 
that he’s still shod with heavy irons—not racin’ 
plates.” After a moment the older man added 
musingly: “I wonder now who that stable boy is? 
Of course they didn’t want to put the jock up be¬ 
cause that would have been a giveaway right off— 
an’ yet that boy that breezed him will bear watch- 
in’.” 

“Maybe,” smiled Burtley. “We’ve made a 
double-barrelled discovery: a new Sysonby and a 
new Tod Sloan—or Billy Moseby.” 

They turned and no word was said as to their 
destination, because no word was needful. Away 



12 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


from the track and through the white-washed village 
of stables their steps carried them both to the barn 
where Parrish stood on the tan-bark walkway con¬ 
templatively watching the rubbing down of his two 
steaming charges. 

The long low barns that housed these satin-coated 
aristocrats of horsedom lay under the spring sun, 
teeming with the activities of the track’s forenoon. 
Uproarious laughter and bantering shouts of Negro 
stable hands sounded loose and rich along the soft 
roads that ran between them. 

Around and around the buildings themselves, and 
in the hoof-trodden spaces beyond, walked black 
and white boys leading blanketed charges, and along 
the rails hung exercise saddles and gear freshly 
soaped and polished. Everywhere were stable 
mascots; goats, cats, and even Shetland ponies, in¬ 
dispensable to those temperamental creatures that 
become restless “stall-walkers” unless they be so 
quaintly companioned. 

Here, hovered over by the fickleness of chance, 
were colts whose names would adorn the stud book 
of the future and blood brothers who would prove 
themselves as paltry of value as the bridles they 
looked through or the saddles they wore. 

At Colonel Parrish’s barn stood the bay colt and 
the brown with rubbers kneading and massaging 
their great sinews and burnishing their coats. They 
submitted to these attentions with nervous and seem- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i3 

ingly conscious pride, and Parrish, who chewed on 
an unlighted cigar, eyed them with contentment. 

The lad who had been in the saddle on the brown 
colt stood now at his head holding the bit rings and 
quieting his nervous excitement with low, incoherent 
words as a Negro sponged the steaming coat and 
scraped him down from forelock to fetlock. “Snip” 
Button, the stable jockey, stood a bit apart as though 
bored by observing tasks so savouring of the menial. 
His legs, in their puttees, were match-thin and his 
body wasp-like with its fight against the encroach¬ 
ments of weight. He looked, as he lounged lan¬ 
guidly in the offing, like a miniature of an old man, 
with sharp, peaked features, sophisticated out of 
keeping with his youth and with an unprepossessing 
cunning in his eyes. 

But the other boy who held the brown muzzle and 
whispered low words to the forward-tilted brown 
ears was not yet spoiled by a public life. He, too, 
was short and slim; not only because he was not yet 
fully grown but also because he carried with him the 
shame of being a runt, and his eyes were deep with 
a sombreness which seemed to brood over his mea¬ 
gerness of stature. 

As two shadows fell across the sunlit walkway, 
Colonel Parrish turned slowly and when his eyes 
encountered Burtley and Billy Moseby they did not 
light to welcome. 

“What’s the colt, Colonel?” inquired the news- 


14 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

paper man affably and the reply came courteously 
but without enthusiasm. 

“Fleetwing, by Electron out of Blue Gown—a 
youngster.” 

“We saw his work—and we timed him,” observed 
Burtley. 

Parrish shifted his unlighted cigar from one side 
of his mouth to the other. His brows furrowed 
into a frown and his steady gray eyes engaged those 
of the reporter. 

“I’m sorry to hear it, sir,” was his brief comment. 
“I was trying to keep him under cover.” 

“I’m not going to include that workout in any 
report at present, Colonel,” reassured the writer. 
“You’ve got a speed prodigy there, from the looks 
of things, and until the form-sheet publishes the 
official dope on him it’s your own affair. The kid 
there handled him nicely, too.” 

The frown cleared on the owner’s face and he 
nodded, while the boy at the brown colt’s head 
flushed brick-red at the compliment, though he only 
stared harder at the velvet nose. 

“Ye-es,” drawled Parrish slowly, “I told him so. 
That’s Tolliver Cornett. Tolliver, this is Mr. Burt¬ 
ley of the Tribune —and Billy Moseby. Billy was 
a premier jockey in his day.” 

The turfman laughed and looked at his cigar. 
“Billy,” he added reminiscently to the Negro, 
“these kids don’t know anything about turf history. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 15 

I doubt if they ever heard of how we bred ’em and 
raced ’em in those days when we asked ’em to go a 
route; when we called on a horse to pick up his 
freight and carry it the best two out of three heats 
—at three and four miles a heat!” 

The white jockey spat through his teeth and 
shrugged. 

“They runs them six-day races on bikes now,” he 
volunteered. “I ain’t much on ancient history my¬ 
self. I likes speed.” 

But the boy holding the brown colt turned his 
head with a bird-like quickness. His dark face 
lighted and his flush grew deeper. 

“Billy Moseby, did ye say,” he demanded, and 
in his excitement he spoke with the unmistakable 
dialect of the Cumberland hills, where thorough¬ 
bred horses are as unknown as zebras, “ye don’t 
mean the same Billy Moseby that rode Ten Broeck 
back yonder in 1878 when he beat Molly Mc¬ 
Carthy?” 

“One of them does know something after all,” 
laughed Parrish with vast amusement. “Here’s an 
exercise boy that goes in for the traditions of the 
turf.—Maybe he won’t always be an exercise boy.” 

The jockey wheeled with an air of insupportable 
boredom and went away with the jaunty impudence 
of a cock sparrow. 


CHAPTER II 


HE sun had gone down clear and the moon 



was throwing blue shadow masses about 


JL acres of low barns that stood out bone 
white in their new paint. It was a city of horses 
and the servants of horses, for long ago the masters 
and brahmins of the sport had gone back from the 
race-track to town. It was not entirely a sleeping 
city, for here and there showed the yellow spot of a 
lighted window, and from here and there came the 
twang of a banjo and the muffled shouts of black 
boys exhorting strange deities over the ritual of the 
“galloping dominoes.” 

Here and there, too, was the resounding thud of 
hoof-plates lashed irritably out against the boarded 
walls of box-stalls or the more restful sound of 
munching over feed boxes, yet above these casual 
sounds brooded a larger silence in the picket-fenced 
enclosure of the horses’ town. 

In front of the stall where Fleetwing, by Electron 
out of Blue Gown, stood on his carpeting of fresh 
straw, Tolliver Cornett sat on a bale of feed with 
his feet hanging and his eyes staring ahead of him. 
In that spectral light and shadow he made a small 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i7 

and somewhat wistful figure, with a lawless lock 
falling dark over his thin face in which the eyes 
seemed inordinately large and owlish. He was 
gazing toward the city whose electric ghost of glare 
hung in the sky to the north—but he was as much 
alone as if he had been sitting on a mountain top. 
With the other exercise boys, white and black, who 
were finding varied companionships here and there 
he had established no commerce and no fellowship. 

Tolliver was immersed deep in reflection and in 
wonder. This was the first real race-track he had 
ever seen, and never yet had he seen it when crowds 
jostled in its stands and the judges stood in the 
kiosk by the finish line. Never, indeed until a little 
while ago, had he seen this flat world of “Down- 
below” whose inhabitants his own people of the 
illiterate mountains called “furriners.” 

A bewildering new life was unrolling before the 
gaze of Tolliver Cornett, and yet his bewilderment 
never admitted itself to any inquiring eye, except 
in that taciturnity which sometimes seemed to wrap 
him in sullenness. 

The months there on a Bluegrass farm, where he 
had accidentally revealed a gift for “gentling” 
fractious colts, had seemed unreal enough and they 
had led on to this which seemed so much stranger. 

Now Tolliver sat alone seeking to digest the 
wonderment which had come too fast for assimila¬ 
tion in its due course. 



18 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

Back there on the stock-farm near Lexington he 
had been an interested waif standing around the 
busy exercise track, the paddocks with their white¬ 
washed fences, and the ample barns. There he had 
first seen this two-year-old colt and, by a miracle 
which he could not quite explain, he had found him¬ 
self annexed to the stable force. 

“1 jest drapped thar,” he mused, “an’ straight¬ 
away tuck root thar.” 

It was this brown colt, magnificently bred and 
looked to with high expectancy from his foaling, 
that had brought it all about; for the youngster had 
at first demonstrated a temper which had been con¬ 
strued into ruinous viciousness. His fine ears had 
lain menacingly back at human approach and his 
hoofs had whipped out disconcertingly. His strong 
young teeth had been bared—and he stood haltered 
between double reins in his stall, into which feeders 
and rubbers ventured timidly. Sometimes, when 
unwatched, stable hands sought to mask that tim¬ 
idity with raucous shouts and deprecations which 
might have impressed a mule but which only enraged 
the high-strong descendant of Phaeton. 

Tolliver, who had no fear of horses, had slipped 
one day without permission into the stall when the 
colt was unhaltered, and shouts of warning had fol¬ 
lowed him. It had been expected that he would be 
reduced, under the thrusting fore feet of the young 
stallion, into a disorder of broken bones before 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


19 

rescuers could reach him, and for a moment of 
tenseness the outcry fell to breathless silence. But 
the boy had gone in talking in a low voice, and the 
brown colt with its back laid ears, distended nostrils, 
and blazing eyes had hesitated, regarding him dubi¬ 
ously as if in amazement for his audacity. 

Five minutes later Tolliver had bridled the animal 
and led him out, converted to an incredible docil¬ 
ity. How he had done it no one quite knew, but 
neither did any one quite care. A colt whose bright 
destiny had been threatened by the curse of the out¬ 
law’s temper had made a friend and become mo¬ 
mentarily at least amenable. Perhaps he was re¬ 
deemed. That was what counted, and much as other 
over-sensitive horses carried in their retinue such 
mascots as goats and dogs, this youngster from the 
Parrish farm had brought along his human friend— 
a mountain lad transplanted in the lowlands. It 
was not a particularly grandiose connection with the 
turf—to be a human mascot carried along to mollify 
the temper of a perverse horse, but Tolliver had 
seized upon it as an opportunity to see that part of 
the world which the colt might aspire to conquer. 

Back there on the farm Tolliver had been the 
first to mount and exercise him, but to-day for the 
first time in his young life the brown had trodden a 
race-course and for the first time in his, Tolliver 
Cornett had ridden on one. He sat here now mull¬ 
ing over these adventures. 


20 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


Reared as he had been among mountains that shut 
a man in between ragged heights and forests that 
threw a mantle of solitude around a man’s life, 
young Tolliver Cornett had not yet wholly accus¬ 
tomed himself to the flatness and outspokenness of 
a lowland world. Now a pang of nostalgia rose 
tide-like in his heart and made him deeply lonely 
for want of a lonelier place. That same moon was 
shining on the trickling waters of Troublesome at 
home to-night, and the brown hills were beginning 
to breathe of spring. Soon the log rafts would 
come down the swollen rivers and the laurel would 
break to bloom. 

Aroused from these thoughts, the boy raised his 
head. Along the moon-drenched roadway just be¬ 
yond the shadow came a figure that walked with that 
silent-footed tread which until recently he had sup¬ 
posed common to all men, but which now he knew 
was the identifying mark of the mountaineer and 
the woodsman. 

The figure halted, looking about in evident per¬ 
plexity and seeming to count the buildings along the 
way. Then Tolliver recognized it, and slipping 
down from the bale of feed he stepped out of the 
blue shadow and stood also in the moonlight. 

“Cal,” he accosted in that low voice which was 
the habit of his people, “Cal, air ye a-seekin’ me?” 

The man in the road wheeled suddenly at the 
sound, then nodded and came forward. 


21 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

“I couldn’t skeercely discarn ye, setting thar in 
ther shadder,” he explained. “They told me ye 
war in one of these hyar hugeous big stable-barns.” 

“Was ye seekin’ ter hev speech with me, Cal?” 

To any chance listener it would have sounded 
strange to hear these two talking the rude dialect of 
the remote Cumberlands in a spot so dedicated to 
the sophistications of the turf. It might have 
seemed strange, too, to hear a seventeen-year-old 
boy addressing a middle-aged uncle by his given 
name—but these two were hillsmen and both had 
relapsed into the speech and the manner of their 
blood. 

“I reckon,” ventured the man irascibly, “thar 
hain’t no patch of hills ner no woodses nigh hyar- 
abouts, whar weuns kin go an’ talk by ourselves, be 
thar? I’m nigh sufflicated with this hyar dead air 
in these hyar flat places. Hit pint-blank gives me 
ther all-overs.” 

The boy shook his head, but he led the way across 
the moon-bathed infield and up into the wide empti¬ 
ness of the grandstand. There alone amid thou¬ 
sands of unoccupied chairs the two solitary figures 
ensconced themselves and looked away from the 
town. From that point of vantage could be seen 
a line of low, round-shouldered hills to the south 
which, by free play of imagination, might be con¬ 
sidered little brothers of mountains. 

“I don’t skeercely fathom my own aim in farin’ 



22 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


down hyar ter counsel with ye, Tolly,” began Cal 
Deering in a hard voice. “Thar hain’t no master 
aid ye kin give. Ye war always a kinderly puny boy 
an’ this business calls fer a survigrous man-person.” 

The boy met the scowl of his elder kinsman and 
engaged it with unflinching levelness. 

“I hain’t nuver giv’ more’n half ther road ter no 
man yit,” he responded evenly. “I hain’t nuver 
tuck nothin’ offen nobody, ef thet’s what ye means, 
Cal.” 

The uncle laughed shortly. 

“I wasn’t aimin’ ter belittle ye, Tolly,” he made 
half-apology, “an’ atter all I reckon ye’re full stout 
enough ter handle a rifle-gun—ef only ye hadn’t 
been fotched up ter ther idee of wagin’ battles in 
co’t. Co’t, hell!” 

The speaker spat contemptuously, and added, “A 
man’s pintedly got ter fight ther devil with fire—not 
with law books.” 

Tolliver Cornett let his glance stray to the hills. 

“I reckon I knows what ye’re drivin’ at, Cal,” he 
said quietly. “Hit’s my pap ye’re faultin’ and 
censurin’ because he aims ter penitenshery Malone 
an’ Cropper. Waal, he’s ther prosecutor of ther 
High-Co’t, hain’t he?” 

“Ef he enjoyed as much chanst ter succeed es 
snow does of layin’ on ther ground in hell,” ob¬ 
served Cal witheringly, “I wouldn’t censure him 
none—but he don’t. Them men owns ther co’t- 


THE ROGUES BADGE 


23 

house betwixt ’em, an’ sich as contraries ’em—don’t 
gin’rally live over-long.” 

He broke off and sat with smoldering eyes, then 
he began exasperatedly again: 

“Ye know thet what I says is gospel true, Tolly. 
Yore pap knows hit, too, albeit he’s too bull-necked 
ter ack heedful. Thar’s some siv’ral men done con- 
traried Malone an’ Cropper afore now, an’ is airy 
one of ’em alive terday? Jesse Tavish was found 
layin’ in ther creek-bed one sun-up wasn’t he? An’ 
Red MacVey was haled ter ther door of his house 
in ther night-time an’ drapped down an’ died 
thar, didn’t he? But ye knows them things as 
well as me. An’ yit yore pap aims ter go inter ther 
co’t house an’ hev ther owners of ther place con¬ 
victed. He’s plum fittified, Tolly, an’ ef thar’s 
anybody kin turn him aside betimes hit’ll be a God’s 
blessin’.” 

The boy rose from his seat and stood for a few 
minutes rigid and tense. His slight stature seemed 
shrunken to even smaller and less heroic propor¬ 
tions than the ordinary, but his dark eyes were 
ember-bright and at length he turned, facing his 
visitor and speaking in a fiercely low voice: 

“Them’s ther sort of doin’s my pap aims ter put 
an end ter fer all time, Cal. He hain’t ergoin’ ter 
suffer hit no longer thet ther hills of old Kaintuck 
shell lay under ther curse of feud-fightin’ an’ shots 
from ther bresh. He hain’t ergoin’ ter suffer hit no 


24 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


longer thet the best folks on airth stands disgusted 
afore all ther balance of mankind. God a’mighty 
knows Cropper an’ Malone needs killin’ right bad 
—but hit’s got ter be on ther gallows so all men kin 
see why they hangs an’ so’s they kin be a sample ter 
ther world.” 

The boy broke off, embarrassed by so long a 
speech, but when no reply came to his declarations 
he went on again doggedly: “Thar’s jest one man in 
ther mountings thet’s got ther sense ter see thet an’ 
thet’s got ther heart an’ cravin’ ter do his duty. 
Thet man’s my pap.” 

“Does ye reckon, Tolly,” demanded the man 
wrathfully, “ef yore pap hed done campaigned afore 
ther people on sichlike a damn-fool platform as thet, 
he’d ever hev got elected prosecutor of the co’t? 
Does ye reckon prudent-thoughted men would hev 
chanced death thet-a-way by displeasurin’ Malone 
an’ Cropper?” 

“No, I don’t hardly reckon they would, Cal,” re¬ 
plied the boy curtly. “I don’t skeercely reckon you 
an’ yore like would of durst do any sich upstandin’ 
thing—an’ like as not thet’s why my pap didn’t tell 
ye aforehand. Malone an’ Cropper hain’t nuver 
stood up ter no man yit in fair fight—but they’ve 
done hired th’ar enemies murdered—an’ ther time’s 
done come ter hang ’em. Now my pap’s co.min’ 
out in ther open daylight an’ I reckon thar’ll be a 
lavish of right-thinkin’ men ter foller in his lead. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 25 

Hit takes a survigrous man ter lead other men, Cal, 
an’ my pap’s thet cut of a mortal.” 

‘“Right soon,” observed the other, “he’s liable not 
ter be no manner of mortal at all.” A cutting scorn 
came into the boy’s voice and gave impetus to his 
speech: 

“I reckon ye hain’t gittin’ so bodaciously worked 
up jest outen love fer my pap, Cal. I reckon thar’s 
somethin’ else thet hits closer home ter ye than ther 
risk he’s runnin’, hain’t thar?” 

The man bit from a twist of tobacco and spat. 

“Yore pap,” he admitted, without a trace of em¬ 
barrassment, “aims ter hev me tek ther stand an’ 
testify ergin ’em. Ef I does thet I kain’t go on 
livin’ at home. I’d hev ter leave ther mountings.” 

Tolliver laughed shortly. 

“I lowed thar was a nigger in ther wood pile, Cal. 
So ye fared cl’ar down hyar from ther mountings ter 
beseech me ter dissuade my pap? Wa’al, ther devil 
from hell hisself couldn’t dissuade him, Cal—an’ 
even ef I hed more power then ther devil from hell 
I wouldn’t raise no finger ter turn him aside.” 

“Ef he goes for’ard with this fool projick,” 
warned Deering earnestly, “without takin’ warnin’ 
afore hit’s too late, come corn drappin’ time next 
ya’r ye won’t hev no pap, Tolly. He’ll be dead an’ 
rottin’ along with all ther balance thet got too 
feisty.” 

The boy shook his head. 


2 6 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

“No, he won’t be dead, Cal,” he asserted confi¬ 
dently. “He’s got ther Lord A’mighty aidin’ an’ 
abettin’ him an’ I reckon thet’s enough.” He drew 
a long breath. “But yit,” he added in a lowered 
tone, “even ef he plumb knowed thet, come next corn- 
drappin’, he’d be dead fer hit, pap wouldn’t forego 
what he’s undertook, ner I wouldn’t seek ter hinder 
him neither.” 

Deering, whose sister was this boy’s mother, 
laughed unpleasantly. 

“Hit’s plumb easy fer a banty rooster ter crow 
brave an’ loud, when he’s a far distance off from 
ther roosters he’s a’crowin’ at,” he commented. “I 
reckon down hyar in ther settlemints, Malone ner 
Cropper kain’t handily git at ye, Tolly. Ye kin 
afford ter talk biggity.” 

In the moonlight the brick-red flush of rage that 
flooded the boy’s lean face went unseen, but in his 
voice sounded the tremor of hard-held fury. 

“Thet’s a damn lie, Cal Deering,” he announced, 
“an albeit ye’re my own flesh an’ blood, I tells ye so 
ter yore face. I hain’t so fur away from home thet 
I kain’t go back thar—an ef so be my pap don’t live 
ter finish his job, God A’mighty knows I aims ter 
fare back an’ finish hit fer him—but I won’t do hit 
with no rifle-gun from the la’rel. I’ll do hit by 
hangin’ jest ther same es he started out ter do.” 


CHAPTER III 


E ARLY the next morning, when Colonel Par¬ 
rish stepped out of his car before the long 
barn where his string was stabled, he read in 
the downcast face of John Powers, his trainer, that 
bad news of some sort awaited him, and he de¬ 
manded with philosophic calm to be told its nature. 

“The Electron colt’s coughing,” announced Pow¬ 
ers without preamble. “And he’s off his feed.” 

“Have you had Springer in?” demanded Parrish, 
and the trainer shook his head. 

“I’ve sent for him, of course,” was the answer, 
“but he hasn’t come.” He gave a short, uncomfort¬ 
able laugh and added, “Springer has more work on 
his hands this morning than three vets can handle. 
Horses are coughing all up and down the line. 
Meanwhile I’ve been doing what I could.” 

Colonel Parrish scowled. 

“A cough epidemic going round,” he said, “would 
put a nasty crimp into our outlook for the season. 
If we have to ship them all back to the farm now, 
our training goes to pot. There isn’t enough time 
before opening day.” 


27 


28 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

The trainer nodded and cursed dismally in under¬ 
tones. 

“At least,” he said, “we can find out something 
now. There comes Springer at last.” 

The veterinary was a stocky man who looked as 
though he had been lifted out of an English sport¬ 
ing print. He was gray and ruddy with mutton- 
chop side-burns, and he came puffing up with his 
handbag to inquire briskly, “Which stall?” 

The brown colt was lying dejectedly on his bed¬ 
ding of straw, and his great muscled frame had a 
languid inertness which it was hard to reconcile with 
the rippling power and speed of twenty-four hours 
before. 

“Hullo, what’s this?” exclaimed the veterinary, 
as he stooped beneath the stall bar and saw a small, 
dispirited human figure rise from a seated posture 
on an overturned bucket in one corner; a human fig¬ 
ure whose face was drawn into a mask of semi-tragic 
anxiety. 

“He hain’t a’goin’ ter die, is he?” demanded 
the boy fiercely, and while the veterinary explained 
that as yet he had made no diagnosis, John Powers 
turned to his employer. 

“The Cornett kid heard him coughing late in the 
night,” he said, “and came to wake me up. He’s 
been sitting there with him ever since, holding the 
steam buckets under his nose and nursing him like 
a baby. I can’t get him to leave for breakfast.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 29 

“Come on out, son,” ordered Parrish in a kindly 
voice. “I guess we don’t have to mourn over him 
yet. It’s bad enough if he’s got to break training 
and go back to the pasture, but that needn’t keep 
you from eating.” 

“I hain’t hankerin’ fer vittles,” declared a woe¬ 
begone voice. “I reckon they’d kinderly stick in my 
throat.” 

Colonel Parrish clapped his hand on the thin 
shoulder. 

“Nonsense, son, you don’t have to take it so to 
heart,” he reassured, though his own heart was 
heavy. “If the colt’s going to be badly off we’ll 
need you later on and you won’t be much good on an 
empty stomach. Beat it now, and when you come 
back we’ll know more.” 

As, unwillingly and laggingly, the boy took him¬ 
self away, Parrish stood looking after him. Here 
was an interesting human equation and one new to 
his experience. He himself had more than once sat 
up night-long with a sick thoroughbred, but he had 
bred and reared these animals long enough to know 
how perishable they are and had armed himself with 
a requisite philosophy. Here in this stall was a 
colt that had seemed to hold out to him an extraor¬ 
dinary richness of promise, such richness as would 
compensate for the many disappointments that came 
in the sequence of racing experience. Now perhaps 
that prospect of sending to the races another great 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


30 

performer was about to be blighted before the 
brown had ever been saddled under colours or faced 
the flag. If so it was only such a misfortune as he 
had met before and would probably meet again, but 
this boy had no monetary interest to be hurt, no 
pride of ownership to flinch, no memories of past 
exultation to fire him or past defeats to be com¬ 
pensated for. He had never even seen an actual 
race run. 

Yet Tolliver would not willingly leave the stall, 
even for food—and after all, except for the boy’s 
extraordinary influence with horses, this colt might 
yet have been the savage young creature in revolt, 
whose stall no one could enter without bodily 
danger. 

The Colonel stood still pondering the vicissitudes 
of the game when, a half hour later, Tolliver reap¬ 
peared and in answer to the questioning eyes he said 
amiably, “Well, son, the colt doesn’t seem to be in 
a very bad way—though it’s disheartening enough, 
at that. We’ve got to ship him back to the farm.” 

“Hain’t he goin’ ter race?” The question was 
almost barked out. “Hain’t he goin’ ter show ’em 
what he kin do?” 

Parrish smiled ruefully and shook a dubious head. 

“It doesn’t look now as if he’d go to the races 
this spring—and it’s a damned shame.” 

“Hit’s plum awful,” echoed Tolliver, tragically. 

“Come over here, son,” ordered the Colonel, and 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 31 

when he had led the way to the end of the barn he 
lighted a cigar and studied the boy with interested 
eyes. 

“Now the situation is this,” he began, rather won¬ 
dering why he should feel impelled to talk confi¬ 
dentially with a stable helper, yet feeling that, some¬ 
how, this lad could not be dismissed as only that. 
“It seems the most prudent thing to ship the Elec¬ 
tron colt back home and condition him there. He’s 
too good a prospect to take chances with. Pow¬ 
ers will look after the rest of the string here, unless 
others get this damned cough too. Meanwhile you 
and I will give the colt such work as we can at 
home.” 

“I wouldn’t skeercely want ter tarry hyar—ef he 
went away,” came the immediate response. “I’d 
keep a’frettin’ erbout him.” 

The owner shook an amused head. 

“Perhaps he can be galloped again soon. He may 
still be ready for some of his spring engagements 
—but I doubt it. A colt can’t face the barrier with 
only farm work . . . and I’d begun to believe 

the two-year-old prizes were his for the taking.” 

“I reckon he’s the greatest hoss in ther world,” 
came the absurdly solemn assertion, and the owner 
smilingly shook his head. 

“No, he’s not that by a jugful, but he looks mighty 
good—or did before this cough. If he proves to 
have stamina as well as foot, there’s no telling-” 






32 THE ROGUE’S BADGE x 

Suddenly the owner broke off and eyed the boy 
curiously. “But why are you so interested, Tol¬ 
liver?” 

“Thet colt,” said the exercise boy slowly, “is jest 
erbout ther best friend I’ve got—an’ ther onliest 
one this side of the Kaintuck Ridges.” 

“Is it only that colt you’re fond of—or is it 
horses in general, Tolliver?” 

“It’s all hosses right smart—but hit’s him like all 
hell.” 

The breeder puffed meditatively on his cigar for 
an interval of silence—a silence at last broken by the 
boy. 

“I war jest a-studyin’ erbout somethin’, Colonel,” 
he stammered shyly. “I war jest wonderin’ ef some 
day, when I knows a lavish more’n I knows now, I 
mout ride Fleetwing in a race?” 

“Do you want to be a jockey, son?” 

The boy’s eyes gleamed, but the enthusiasm of 
his thoughts came through a clogged and sluggish 
channel of speech. 

“I’d plum relish ter ride in a real race,” he am 
nounced. 

“Have you been hearing stories of jockeys that 
make as much in a year as a bank president?” 

Tolliver stiffened a little as though cold water 
had been flung into his face. 

“I warn’t ter say studyin’ erbout ther money,” 
he made slow asseveration. “I don’t know much 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 33 

ner keer master much erbout money, nohow. Up 
thar whar I war raised up at, folks is most all pore 
an’ nobody hain’t ashamed of hit.” 

A sudden shyness strangled his speech and silence 
came over him. 

“Yesterday, Tolliver,” interpolated Colonel Par¬ 
rish thoughtfully, “when I told you who Billy 
Moseby was, you spoke of the Ten Broeck-Molly 
McCarthy race. That was run a long time before 
your day. How did you happen to know about it?” 

Again the boy shuffled his feet uneasily. 

“I read all erbout hit in a book.” 

“What started you reading about such things?” 

“I don’t know es I kin jedgmatically tell ye thet. 
I jest kain’t holp a-readin’ every word I comes 
acrost erbout race hosses. Hit seems kinderly won¬ 
drous-like how all ther race hosses in ther world 
come straight down from ther Godolphin Arabian 
an’ ther Darley Turk.” 

Once more the mountain boy broke off, smitten 
with self-consciousness for his own loquacity, and 
the man encouragingly prompted him. “Yes, it is 
a fascinating study. What were you going to say?” 

“An’ how,” went on Tolliver Cornett, “ther fust 
daddy an’ fore-parent of all ther thoroughbreds 
pulled a waggon round ther streets of Paris, France, 
acrost ther sea, afore they fotched him ter Eng¬ 
land.” 

Colonel Parrish lifted his brows. Here was a 





34 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

fanatic for tradition, and with a few well directed 
questions he discovered a surprising fund of turf 
knowledge in a youth who bore the outward seem¬ 
ing of almost squalid ignorance. 

“So you want to ride races,” he said at length, 
“not so much because there’s money in it as because 
you love horse-flesh.” 

“I reckon thet’s erbout hit.” 

“Back there a few miles from my farm in Wood¬ 
ford County, Tolliver,” said Parrish quietly, “two 
great sires, Ten Broeck and Longfellow, lie buried 
with stones and inscriptions over their graves.” 

/ “I knows hit,” came the eager response. “I’ve 
done fared over thar an’ looked at ’em.” 

“And old Frank Harper who bred and ran those 
horses,” went on the Colonel, “never bet a cent on 
a race in his life. He was a rigid churchman and 
it wasn’t a money proposition with him.” 

“I knows thet,” agreed the boy. “He didn’t 
deem hit godly ter gamble an’ he didn’t delight none 
ter ack sinful.” 

Parrish stood looking narrowly at this human 
curio who had turned up in his own training estab¬ 
lishment, and a speculative interest kindled his 
thoughts. When he next spoke it was rather to 
himself than to his young employee. 

“God never made a sounder type of man,” he 
said, “than the true sportsman—and the devil never 
made a trashier convert than the average sport.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


35 

He paused, his eyes straying to a string of blanketed 
colts being led around a tan-bark ellipse, and then 
he smiled somewhat whimsically. 

“Do you know what it takes to make a jockey, 
son? I mean a real jockey?” 

“I reckon a body’s got ter be right smart.” 

“Not only that. Rats may be smart. The good 
race rider must have courage and judgment beyond 
the ordinary—and he must blend them nicely. His 
head must work coolly while he’s riding at the fast¬ 
est speed that any four-footed creature, except the 
antelope, can travel on its own power. In the 
smother and confusion of backstretch, turn, and 
finish, he must measure the gap between crowding 
saddle skirts and estimate almost to the inch whether 
that gap is wide enough to let him through. He 
must have the nerve to trust that judgment and 
seize his opportunity when it comes, though he 
knows that a miscalculation will carry his mount and 
other mounts down to a welter of broken bones— 
perhaps to death.” 

Tolliver looked down at his shoes and ventured 
the assertion: “I don’t ’low I’d be flabbergasted ner 
affrighted.” 

“The outstanding jockey must be able to judge 
pace,” went on the Colonel. “He carries no split- 
second watch with him as he rates his mount, yet it’s 
got to be ticking in his brain, and when he swings 
himself out of the saddle, if he’s the real thing, he 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


36 

can pretty nearly tell to the fifth of a second, what 
each furlong was run in.” 

“I reckon a feller mout tutor hisself ter do thet.” 

“That’s not all, even yet,” Parrish supplemented. 
“He must have a magnetic something that com¬ 
municates itself to the horse under him, the spirit 
that begets spirit. He must hold up the heavy head 
through the last heart-breaking sixteenth, when a 
horse begins to falter and reel. By his hand-riding 
he must add length to the stride that desperate fa¬ 
tigue is shortening. He must know when to use 
steel and bat—and when not to use either—and 
with every mount he takes to the barrier he must 
change his treatment because no two are alike. It’s 
because this combination of qualities is rare that a 
few outstanding jockeys earn as much in a year as 
the president of the country.” 

“Still there air some few thet kin do all them 
things.” 

“Yes—some very few and some others that can 
do a part of them.” 

“Then thar hain’t no dead-sartain way of tellin’ 
thet I hain’t one of ’em save only by tryin’ me ter 
see, is thar?” 

Parrish laughed. The tone of the assertion 
seemed to free it of the egotism expressed in its 
words. 

The boy stood almost palsied by his eagerness. 
His dark eyes were wide and for a moment he for- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


37 

got the demands of a racial stoicism. He had 
dared to voice an ambition which had seemed, to 
himself, too vaulting for realization, and the man 
to whom he had spoken it had given him a hearing, 
without rebuke. 

But in Parrish’s mind a fantastic conception was 
formulating that wholly engrossed him. He had 
before now been an experimenter in new ideas. He 
had tested original methods of crossing blood lines 
and of training. Now he was asking himself, 
“What would a jockey with a background be like?” 

Here was a boy, who, though he talked a crude 
idiom, knew something of the turf’s past. His very 
ignorance in a general sense might make his mind 
virgin soil ready for tilling to productivity—and 
his illiteracy was a matter of geography and cir¬ 
cumstance. The mind itself was a sponge eager 
and able to soak up knowledge. Slowly the breeder 
let a part of his thought find expression in words. 

“It may be that you have born in you those quali¬ 
ties that must be born in a good race-rider. If that’s 
true, the rest might be learned.” 

“God A’mighty knows I craves ter 1 ’arn.” 

Parrish nodded, then went on: 

“I don’t mean that you must just learn the things 
that are taught about a race-track, son. You 
would need to have ahead of you and keep in view 
the idea of leaving the saddle when you get too 
heavy for it, not as a waster and a has-been but as a 


38 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

man who had been using the race-track as a college. 
Perhaps it’s a fantastic notion, but we might have a 
whirl at it. It’s largely a question of stamina, I 
expect. Do you think you can carry the weight 
over a route?” 

“I kin strive ter do hit—an’ I’m seekin’ ter git 
eddication other ways, too,” declared the boy 
quickly. “I talks like an ignoramus because thet’s 
what most folks does whar I comes from, but my 
pap talks like a dictionary, an’ I’m studyin’ every 
day betwixt chores. I aims ter be a lawyer some 
good day.” 

“A lawyer—fine!” exclaimed Parrish with de¬ 
lighted amusement yet with no trace of derision or 
condenscension. “The law-student jockey! I 
don’t believe it’s been done before. But why the 
law, son?” 

Tolliver’s eyes narrowed and he hesitated; then 
he spoke on a note of defiance: 

“My pap’s mixed up in some lawin’,” he said, 
“thet’s right apt ter last longer then what he does, 
hisself. Ef so be he should die afore he plum fin¬ 
ishes hit, I’ve got ter wind hit up.” 

The Colonel nodded. “Now as to size,” he said, 
“how old are you? Of course, you may get too 
heavy before you learn to ride.” 

Tolliver’s face burned brick-red and this time he 
spoke with the agitation of an old and festering 
shame. 






THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


39 

“Thet’s ther one thing thet would make me plum 
willin’ ter give up ridin’ races,” he announced vehem¬ 
ently. “I comes of a stock of men thet stands up 
six feet high, bare-footed—an’ I’m ther only runt 
thet ever tuck ther name Cornett. Folks up thar in 
ther mountings all disgusts me fer bein’ half-sized. 
They don’t ’low I kin ever be much of a man, no¬ 
ways—an’ I’m seventeen now, goin’ on eighteen— 
an’ I weighs erbout es much as a calico sun-bonnet.” 

This unexpected flare of self-contempt had burst 
from the thin lips with the eruption of long re¬ 
pressed mortification, and its sincerity was unmis¬ 
takably anguished. It had been one of those flashes 
in which youth reveals itself and uncloaks its deeps 
of tragic feeling. 

“When you get your full growth,” reassured the 
man, “you’ll probably be as big as Napoleon Bona¬ 
parte. Meanwhile we’ll find out if you have the 
makings of a jockey. If you develop well I’ll try 
to get you a mount or two as an apprentice at Lex¬ 
ington, and we’ll see what you can do in silks.” 

The black cloud of misery which had enveloped 
the boy with his brooding over his pygmy propor¬ 
tions was dissipated as suddenly as mountain skies 
clear after mountain storms, and his eyes gleamed 
triumphantly. 

“I’ll aims ter do ther best I knows,” he made fer¬ 
vent avowal. 






CHAPTER IV 


HE jockey with a background!” chuckled 



Paul Creighton. “The law-student knight 


A of the pigskin! That’s rather priceless I 
should say.” 

The tall man with prematurely white hair stood 
at Colonel Parrish’s elbow on the training track at 
Woodstock Farm, where those youngsters that had 
not been shipped to town were being handled. The 
place had a background of spacious paddocks with 
white-washed fences, and in the distance stood the 
old Parrish mansion. 

“And yet why not?” inquired the Colonel gravely. 
“If this young barbarian is genuinely ambitious, he 
can be studying in his ample periods of leisure—and 
a developing mind will help his riding. Then when 
he goes heavy he won’t be a burned-out candle. He 
can unsaddle and salute the judges after his last 
race, with money in the bank. He can step across 
to the Courthouse with a brief case in his hand in¬ 
stead of a racing bat—and salute the judges there. 
If he fails it doesn’t disprove my theory at all. It 
merely proves that I tried it on the wrong boy.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 41 

Creighton laughed again. On these bright spring 
mornings when the thud of hoofs beat their cheerful 
tattoo on the soft earth of his friend’s training track 
he could forget certain things in the memory of 
which he found no satisfaction. For one thing, he 
could momentarily forget that of all these fine old 
places with their ripe traditions, his was one of the 
few that had passed under the hammer of the auc¬ 
tioneer into alien hands, and that the house he now 
occupied had been, in other days, a tenant’s cottage. 
There was little solace in the realization that ex¬ 
travagance and inordinate vanity had let him down. 
Once he had set the pace in open-handedness and 
like other early pacemakers, human and equine, he 
had seen the ruck trail past him. He had been an 
“also-ran.” Now nothing was left him but memory 
and vain pride and he lived as did the “tobacco 
yaps” whom his class pride despised. At times he 
wished he were hidden away somewhere where no 
one could look back through the corrosion of his for¬ 
tunes and perceive the completeness of his decay. 
Yet anywhere else he would be only a neglected 
insolvent and here he still walked with the high¬ 
headed assurance of a D’Artagnan in faded cloak 
and bedraggled plumes. Here no word ever re¬ 
minded him of differences between himself and the 
men and women whom he had once wined and dined. 

For himself that consideration might be an empty 
consolation after all, but for his two daughters it 


42 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

was more. It placed them socially and absolved 
them, in a fashion, from his own failures. Else¬ 
where he and his would be poor whites. Here they 
were still of the gentry, and in memory of his past 
grandeur, he was still called “King” Creighton. 

“Are you racing Greentassel at Lexington, Paul?” 
inquired Parrish and his old friend shook his head 
with a wry smile. 

“Winter racing has left her stale, Clay,” he an¬ 
swered, “and I can’t afford racing that doesn’t pay. 
I’m hoping to slip her into a soft spot or two, later 
on, at the Downs.” 

Parrish nodded. He knew the unique history of 
Greentassel; how for several years this single rem¬ 
nant of a once notable string had supported a 
family of three; how Cary Creighton, a young wo¬ 
man of twenty, had taken over the work of her 
father during a long illness that disqualified him, 
and campaigned the single selling plater on the 
tracks of Mexico and Havana, meanwhile bearing 
herself with an unaffected dignity which had been 
acknowledged alike by stewards and touts. 

“Cary,” said Creighton quietly, “knows as much 
about horses as I do—more. She knows enough to 
run them for the purse and to leave the betting shed 
alone, and Shirley can outride a good many present- 
day jockeys. If my girls were boys the Creighton 
colours would come back to their own.” 

Realizing that the conversation was drifting into 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


43 

woeful shoals of personality, Parrish turned it 
sharply aside. 

“I want this mountain boy well-grounded in the 
history of the turf,” he said musingly. “In my 
scheme of things he’s got to acquire background, you 
know. May I send him over now and then and let 
him sit at your feet, Paul?” 

Creighton laughed. 

“By all means, old man. Any protege of yours 
is welcome—though I don’t much fancy the un¬ 
washed louts he lives with. I’ve had neighbours I 
enjoyed more.” 

“His father is a court prosecutor up in the moun¬ 
tains,” observed the Colonel. “A courageous fel¬ 
low of some learning and I dare say of good, if 
run-down, stock. Indeed—” he laughed reminis¬ 
cently—“Tolliver tells me he talks dictionary 
words.” 

It was with a disturbing perturbation of spirit 
which brought his heart into his throat that the ex¬ 
ercise boy from the Parrish stables stood at Paul 
Creighton’s door and summoned his courage to rap 
upon it. Indeed he, who was accustomed in his 
own country to shout his name from the stile, 
rapped so timidly that no one heard, and after a 
little he summoned his courage to knock again. 

It was night and the moon rode high over wood¬ 
lands of hickory, walnut, and oak, and through the 
lowlands twisted and wound the shallow Elkhorn,, 






THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


44 

a creek that “headed up” in his own mountains and 
whispered to him of its distant beginnings. 

But there were no comforting curtains of high- 
flung peaks and no whippoorwill calls from the 
heaviness of timber. Here the country rolled with 
a gentle swell and to him it seemed flat. 

Then the door opened, swinging back on a yellow 
curtain of lamplight, and in this frame, silhouetted 
against it, stood a slim girl of perhaps fifteen, with 
an aura from the inner illumination about a dark 
head that was set pridefully on her shoulders. 

The girl, who was still a shadow-contour, looked 
out, and thinking at first that this roughly clothed 
lad at the doorstep was the emissary of some gypsy 
caravan, she blocked his way and demanded curtly, 
“What do you want?” 

Tolliver could find no answer. In the simple 
gospel in which he had been reared, hospitality opens 
the door without challenge to every man who is 
not a professed or suspected enemy and questions 
him, if questioning be necessary, inside the thresh¬ 
old. 

To his cheek bones mantled the colour of affront, 
and at last he said in a level quietness: “I reckon 
I don’t want nothin’. I’ve done come ter ther 
wrong place—an’ I bids ye farewell.” 

But Creighton, from his dilapidated easy-chair 
inside, had heard the question of his younger daugh¬ 
ter and its answer, and now he laughingly sang out, 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


45 

“This is the right place, Tolliver, only Shirley didn’t 
know you. Come right in.” 

Fastidiously the girl drew aside, and edging 
around her at as great a distance as he could con¬ 
trive, the boy entered the house. Between him and 
her, as he came, shot the hostility of a childish feud, 
founded on first impressions. 

Inside the place he saw, too, the elder daughter, 
a slim young woman with masses of dark hair and 
large dark eyes, who greeted him with a musical 
little laugh of friendliness and understanding. 

Then the girls disappeared and as Creighton sat 
back with half-closed lids Tolliver was listening to 
sagas of great races and drinking in the achieve¬ 
ments of horses and horsemen. 

The man who talked knew his topic and the boy 
who listened loved it, and to the youngster the charm 
was in no way discounted by the fact that Paul 
Creighton was by nature a Munchausen who em¬ 
bellished his narrative and pictured himself as the 
hero of many adventurous episodes in which he had 
actually played no part. Creighton was that type 
of egotist who comes to believe his own yarns and 
whose mendacity is innocent self-glorification. 

* * * 

Tom Burtley went into the cubicle off the Trib¬ 
une’s city room which was the sanctum of the man¬ 
aging editor, wondering vaguely why he had been 


4 6 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

summoned into the Presence, and Doyle left him 
for the moment to his speculations while he 
marked certain changes of make-up on a first-page 
dummy. 

Having finished that, the M. E. turned and an¬ 
nounced abruptly: “I want you to go out of town, 
Burtley, on an assignment to the mountains. I’m 
not sending Stengler, because he’s a married man.” 

Even the dignity of high chiefs failed to quench 
the breezy exuberance of the young reporter, and 
now he grinned. 

“Is it as bad a job as that?” he questioned im¬ 
pudently. 

“I’m sending you up into the bloody hills,” came 
the amused response. “Two companies of the 
First Regiment are ordered to sit on the lid at Hixon 
while a couple of murder barons in the pure-feud 
belt are being tried and convicted. They entrain 
before daybreak—and you are to entrain with 
them.” 

“So there’s a new war-cloud in the local Bal¬ 
kans,” grinned Burtley even more broadly. “Well, 
every Kentucky reporter who nurses an ambition to 
write the Great American Novel has to cut his teeth 
on that adventure, I suppose. What’s the present 
eruption about, sir?” 

The managing editor thrust out a sheaf of clip¬ 
pings, a typed telegraphic dispatch or two, and an 
envelope containing expense funds. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 47 

“You’ll find what information I can give you 
there,” he said. “The rest is for you to dig up. 
There’s a prosecutor down there who’s girded him¬ 
self with the might of righteousness and started in 
to break the power of local despots. There’s to be 
a special term of court with a judge from another 
district sitting. There are to be distinguished de¬ 
fendants and learned counsel. Likewise, since the 
coming of the law is uninvited, there is to be a cor¬ 
don of bayonets for the maintenance of order.” 

“This prosecutor you speak of, sir”—young Burt- 
ley scratched his nose with his pencil—“what impels 
him to seek martyrdom?” 

“If it’s self-exploitation,” answered the M. E., 
“it’s a bad game. The best he can get is the worst 
of it. He’ll convict no one and when the tumult 
and the shouting dies, when the captains and pla¬ 
toons depart, there’s rather likely to be a quiet little 
killing down there in the crags, and the bold pros¬ 
ecutor will be the killee. His name is Tolliver 
Cornett.” 

“Tolliver Cornett,” repeated the younger man 
thoughtfully. “That’s a name that sounds familiar, 
and yet it’s not a common one.” He searched his 
memory for a moment, then exclaimed: “I’ve got it. 
I saw an exercise boy out at the track a few days 
ago who wasn’t any common stable swipe. He 
had the same name.” 


48 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

Tommy Burtley was young enough and imagina¬ 
tive enough to find a thrill in the situation. 

Here he was on a train, running as a special from 
Louisville through the rich Bluegrass country, 
through the broken foothills beyond and on into 
the Cumberlands. Of those mountains he knew 
only from reading and hearsay, but he thought of 
them in the colours and shapes of picturesqueness. 
There, cut off from east and west by parapets of 
stone and the raggedness of forests, dwelt a race 
that had for two centuries held aloof in turreted 
pride and poverty, in ignorance and sullenness. 
There one heard a quaint and ancient idiom spoken, 
and there one still encountered the sporadic and 
grim upleaping of human passions into the blood- 
feud. So to young Burtley the train was taking 
him' not only some two hundred miles from home 
and back into the hinterland but also two centuries 
into the past. And the train was a troop train 
carrying lowland guns and bayonets to enforce low¬ 
land ideas of law on a highland fretfulness of spirit. 
So little delusion of welcome went with the invaders 
that during the last steep stages of the run a pilot 
engine would be thrown ahead, as a reconnaissance 
point is thrust out before an advancing column of 
infantry, to guard against the surprise of dynamite 
on the road-bed. 

Of the two men who were to face trial, so hedged 
about with the trappings of authority, the reporter 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


49 

knew little enough that was authentic and much that 
was legendary. One had been a county judge and 
the other his sheriff. Both were now retired from 
office and both were, by mountain standards, rich. 
Yet the pair were reputed to hold in the hollows of 
their hands the destinies of that country, and now, 
because a lawyer fired with an uncompromising 
spirit had challenged their autocracy, they stood 
indicted for murder. They were to be tried this 
time not by a local judge who faltered in awe of 
their power, but by a man from beyond the borders 
of their baronial jurisdiction, alien to their thought 
—and the Commonwealth charged that not one but 
several enemies had fallen dead under the hands of 
assassins who were in effect and in fact their mer¬ 
cenaries. 

Young Burtley almost found it in his heart to 
pity these unfortunates, who had for once appeared 
to overreach themselves. He pictured them as 
rough-hewn pioneer types who had failed to cal¬ 
culate that the arm of the Law could reach into their 
stronghold and haul them out of its false security, 
as if by the scruffs of their unshaven necks. He had 
heard of them as men who, in famine-time, fed the 
poor and in times of anger avenged with death, and 
though plainly evil, they were, to his thought, be- 
guilingly picturesque—too picturesque to hang. 

His emotions quickened as the scenery changed 
from a land of white turnpikes and ordered coun- 


50 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

try houses to one of clay roads, tangled under¬ 
growth, and unkempt log cabins. When the rivers 
began to be log-laden and cloud wisps to trail like 
arrested shrapnel-puffs along the upper slopes, his 
pulses leaped as if on beholding a romantic stage- 
set. There was grandeur in these forests and 
beauty along crags white as foam with elder blos¬ 
som and pink with laurel. 

Finally at Hixon Town itself, which was their 
destination, the train halted at the shabby red sta¬ 
tion which squatted at the edge of a shack town and 
Burtley stood aside, as a civilian must, while the 
uniformed and armed men of two companies de¬ 
trained. They lined up on the cinders between 
crowds that spoke no word of greeting, but that 
stood sullenly wordless and blackly scowling. 

As the troops, with swinging rifles and shouldered 
packs, wheeled from line into column, these human 
clusters of jeans-clad natives gave grudgingly back 
before them, not so much as if in fear of their arms 
as if in avoidance of contamination. Tommy Burt¬ 
ley dropped off the train and lingered inquisitively 
behind. It was his purpose to engage some of the 
bystanders in conversation and, as he would have 
put it, to feel the pulse of local sentiment. 

So he addressed himself affably to a patriarchal- 
seeming man, shirt-sleeved and heavily bearded, 
who rapped on the cinders with a long hickory 
staff. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


5i 

“Good morning, sir,” said the reporter. “It’s 
a fine day, isn’t it?” 

The man raised sullenly burning eyes and slowly 
raked the young stranger from hat-crown to shoe- 
leather. He made no reply except for that de¬ 
liberately hostile scrutiny, and when its scornful 
appraisal ended he turned his back and walked 
contemptuously away. 

Burtley flushed with quick anger, and his glance 
went rapidly about the place, to encounter on every 
other face a similar animosity. 

Here was a spirit which might at any moment 
break into a more assertive anger, and the silence 
gave into a low growling chorus. If these had been 
dogs instead of men the same mood would have 
brought their hackles upstanding along their shoul¬ 
ders. Suddenly it was borne in on Tommy Burtley 
that, for the present at least, it might be discreet to 
follow the troops before too great an interval 
opened between their rear guard and this native un¬ 
welcome—yet he was unwilling to seem speeded by 
a hostile demonstration. He glanced appraisingly 
about him. Surely in a crowd numbering two score 
there must be some representative citizen who 
would sponsor so unoffending a stranger. 

Meanwhile he stood under a volley fire of enmity. 

He had endured this ostracism of unkind eyes 
beyond the limits of comfort when he saw a new 
figure arriving through the edge of the crowd: a 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


52 

native who raised his hand and heartily called out, 
“Howdy, stranger.” 

The man was of medium height and neither thin 
nor heavy, but stockily set up and dressed much as 
a somewhat careless business man in town might 
have been dressed, except that no necktie graced the 
meeting of his white shirt and low collar. In the 
face of this new arrival, though, was a twinkle of 
humour and his jaw had the composed set of self- 
reliance. Now as he came forward, the crowd 
opened for him with a sort of rude deference and 
he nodded brief recognition to its greetings though 
he did not pause until he had reached the side of the 
newspaper man, who stood in the embarrassment of 
his snubbing. 

“Well, sir,” accosted the newcomer in a genial 
tone. “You seem to be a stranger amongst us— 
and to judge by the train you came on you have 
some connection with the soldiers.” 

Burtley smiled. 

“I’m a reporter,” he said, “but without waiting to 
find out who I was or what I came for, your fellow 
citizens seem to have decided I’m an undesirable.” 

The clean-shaven man smiled again and picked up 
the reporter’s suit case, after which he led the way 
along the muddy street in the wake of the militia¬ 
men who marched ahead at route step. 

“Our folks hereabouts are good bodies but 
simple,” began the local citizen in an amused drawl. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


53 

“They judge a man offhand by the company he 
keeps, and they resent outside interference; especi¬ 
ally when it comes bristling like a hedgehog—with 
bayonets. They saw you with the soldiers and that, 
point-blank, stamped you as a meddler.” 

“God knows I’m neutral enough,” objected the 
reporter. “I represent a newspaper and I come 
without any bias.” 

“Yes, son. I reckon that’s true, but these are un- 
thoughted folk in a fashion and you can’t handily 
blame ’em. They believe we can handle our own 
affairs up here in the hills and they resent ‘fotched- 
on’ law-giving. It looks to them as reasonable that 
they should shoulder their guns and go down to 
Looeyville to superintend your co’t-day activities, 
as for you to come up here to mix in with ours. 
They’re mighty partial to self-government, here¬ 
abouts. It’s all in where you stand as how a mat¬ 
ter looks, anyhow.” 

Burtley shot a glance at the face of his compan¬ 
ion and felt a friendly response to this proffered 
kindliness. 

“I was sent to give facts, not opinions,” he said 
simply. 

“I’m sure you were and when you get to know ’em 
you’ll find our mountain folk the best people in the 
world. You’ll find ’em honest to a fault; hospit¬ 
able to a degree—but powerful set in their ways, 
and content to be so. For two hundred years and 


54 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

more they’ve lived in a back-water of the world— 
an’ lived free. You can’t yank them forward two 
hundred years by a jerk on leading strings. They 
love well and hate well—but you’ll find all that out 
for yourself in due time. Where were you aimin’ 
to go, son—to the hotel?” 

Burtley shook his head. “No,” he said, “I be¬ 
lieve the commanding officer is going to give me a 
tent.” 

The escort frowned thoughtfully but nodded. 

“All right,” he assented, “I’ll go along with you 
till you’re amongst your friends again. I guess 
seein’ you an’ me consortin’ peaceable will sort of 
ease folks’ minds about you, anyhow.” 

The two were approaching the courthouse now 
—a shambling structure about which, somehow, 
hung a redolence of medievalism, and on the narrow 
boardwalk stood a figure which answered to the 
preconceived ideas that Burtley had brought with 
him from the lowlands. This was a tall, gaunt fel¬ 
low with tense and uncompromising features, about 
whose rawboned frame flapped a long-tailed coat 
rusted with age. There were strong assertion of 
purpose and grim humourlessness in that face, and 
as Burtley and his companion passed him he eyed 
the pair with eyes that lighted into an almost bale¬ 
ful hostility. 

Neither Burtley’s escort nor this other spoke in 
greeting, but their glances engaged and clashed like 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 55 

foil blades, and then the walking pair passed on and 
the standing man remained monument-like and un¬ 
moving. 

“An interesting type, that,” hazarded the re¬ 
porter, and his companion nodded. 

“That,” he drawled half humorously, “is the Hon¬ 
ourable Tolliver Cornett, the watch-dog of the law. 
He’s the gentleman that started all this hell a-pop- 
pin’ and brought you and the soldiers here to reg¬ 
ulate us.” 

Involuntarily Tommy Burtley paused to look 
back. The figure still stood there, giving the rigid 
impression of bronze or granite, and Tommy felt 
a dramatic tingle along his scalp. Here was a 
principal actor in the drama he had come a long 
way to watch. 

“The soldiers seem to be haltin’ there around the 
co’t-house,” announced the townsman, “so I guess I 
can bid you farewell.” 

“Thank you,” exclaimed the correspondent heart¬ 
ily. “I’m indebted to you. My name is Tom Burt¬ 
ley of the Louisville Tribune —and yours-?” 

“Me? I’m a Tom, too,” laughed the other easily. 
“My name’s Tom Malone. I’m one of the fellers 
you gentlemen came up here to hang.” 

Burtley stared. His lips hesitated on the verge 
of speech, but the other nodded good-humouredly. 

“I ain’t bein’ hampered in the jail-house, if that’s 
what astonishes you,” he went amiably on. “I’m 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


56 

still free to walk abroad on bond and I hope you’ll 
come in and have speech with me, sometime. I run 
that store just across the street from the co’t-house, 
and you might as well hear both sides before you 
start in writin’ your pieces for the paper.” 

“Thank you,” stammered Burtley. “I’ll come.” 

Judge Malone, storekeeper and alleged murder- 
lord, turned away, then halted again, in after¬ 
thought : 

“I wouldn’t wonder if you’d want to talk to the 
Honourable Tolliver Cornett, too,” he said. “His 
office is just round the corner there, when you get 
ready to seek him out.” 


CHAPTER V 


B URTLEY eyed his new acquaintance with in¬ 
creasing amazement. The last few moments 
had given to the face the bearing, and even 
to the lesser physical characteristics of this man a 
fresh significance, savouring of electric interest. He 
was no longer a mountaineer who happened to stand 
out in contrast with his surly fellows by reason of a 
courtesy and urbanity beyond their own. He had 
suddenly taken on the stature of heroic or villain¬ 
ous bigness and his conduct and words leading up to 
his self-revelation had paved the way for his an¬ 
nouncement of identity precisely as dialogue and 
“business” build for the initial appearance of the 
star on the stage of a playhouse. It had all worked 
up his entrance. 

For a moment Tommy was tempted to believe 
that this theatric effect had been premeditated, 
planned, but at once he abandoned that idea as 
fantastic. This man with no necktie might be a 
lord of guile, but he was hardly a dramatist as well. 

“Of course,” said young Burtley, “I must wel¬ 
come information from all channels and naturally 
I must talk to the prosecutor as well as the defend- 


58 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

ant. But the Honourable Tolliver Cornett looks 
to me like a grouch with a curdled disposition and 
I’m prepared to dislike him. Moreover, he didn’t 
come to welcome me and rescue me from the gather¬ 
ing rage of the mob. You were good enough to do 
both and I feel grateful to you.” 

Judge Malone smiled quietly. 

“I don’t hold no brief for the man that’s seeking 
to hang me or make me suiter in the penitentiary,” 
he admitted. “But yet a man’s got to be fair. 
Cornett didn’t happen to be down at the deepo’ 
when you got in, so he couldn’t handily welcome 
you.” An inner amusement made the steady eyes 
in the strong face twinkle as he drawlingly added: 
“An’ ef so-be he’d been there, he wouldn’t have had 
any master influence with those fellers that were 
standin’ round to see the cars come in.” 

Burtley saw the man about whom so many well- 
nigh incredible stories had been broadcast walk 
calmly away, then he turned and looked at the old 
courthouse itself, and again a prickle came to his 
scalp : that gooseflesh which is the test of inescapable 
drama in life as well as in fiction. 

The century-old building was as the heart of the 
town and it stood in a large square with hitching 
posts strung along its front and flanked on one side 
by the squat structure which was its “jail-house.” 
The columns at its front and the cupola on its top 
were alike gray with the scaling of long-unrenewed 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


59 

paint. He made out pock-like scars about the 
shabby trim and remembered stories i)f a feudal 
battle fought here in the town, years ago, when one 
clan held that court-house as its citadel and another 
attacked from street-barricades. Blackened stains 
still carried reminders of the fire which had finally 
smoked out its defenders. Behind it and beyond the 
town, which was scattered over broken levels, rose 
parapets of scowling mountains; the mountains 
which had by their wildness fostered and preserved 
human wildness and held these highlands quaran¬ 
tined and immune from the march of contemporary 
life. 

Now in the square about that building, like an in¬ 
vasion of modernity into an ancient place, the militia 
companies from Louisville were incuriously and effi¬ 
ciently stacking their arms and making themselves 
at home. 

“It might as well be now,” Tommy Burtley com¬ 
mented to himself, and with a nod of his head he 
stowed his suitcase by a stack of rifles and turned 
his steps toward the spot which Malone had pointed 
out as the law office of the prosecutor. 

There, on a shack-like building, hung the shingle 
which carried the legend, “Tolliver Cornett, 
Lawyer,” and to the door the newspaper man pro¬ 
ceeded. 

With the ignorance of one unschooled to a usage 
in which a man shouts out his name and his inno- 


6o 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


cence of purpose before he enters another man’s 
house, he put his hand on the knob and swung open 
the door, which was unlatched. In this place and 
under these conditions of taut hatreds such conduct 
was both discourteous and dangerous, but the boy 
committed the solecism in callow innocence. 

At once he realized his mistake. The man whom 
he had glimpsed a few minutes before on the street 
standing so stiffly quiet was seated at the deal table 
which served him as a desk, with his head bent low 
over some legal task. The table was littered with 
papers and rusty law books whose sheep bindings 
were scaling from use and age. 

This picture Tommy Burtley saw in the part of 
a second, but only for that scrap of time was there 
such a quiet picture to see. 

At the sound of the opening door, and with an 
amazing swiftness of motion, the seated figure had 
risen and changed of aspect. It had not come to 
full erectness as an attorney ordinarily rises to greet 
a client, but had sprung up with cat-like agility to 
its feet, standing in the half-crouched posture of one 
ready to attack or to resist the violent onslaught of 
an enemy. The right hand, which had an instant 
before been busy with pencil and foolscap sheets, 
was now thrust forward, gripping a tremendously 
heavy and wicked-looking revolver into the face of 
the reporter. 

It must have been an instinctive gesture which led 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


61 

the young man from “down below” who had never 
before looked down such a muzzle to raise his empty 
hands to the level of his head, but he found himself 
doing so with a dispatch that was commendably dis¬ 
creet. 

The rugged face which was looking into his 
startled him into a full realization of the actual. 
The eyes were like pools of lighted ink and they 
held the expression of a man who is physically with¬ 
out fear, yet who walks in momentary expectation 
of an encounter with Death. The quick intake of 
breath in the forward-bending figure told the story 
more compactly and wholly than words. Tolliver 
Cornett knew his own uncertainty of life, and when 
that door had opened, without the warning of 
knock or shout, he had risen to meet the expected 
with his face fronting it—and if possible to exact 
a price. 

“I’m Tom Burtley—a reporter,” said the young 
man rather breathlessly and he felt that his voice 
trembled. 

Tolliver Cornett straightened instantly and laid 
the weapon down on the table before him. 

“Up here in the hills, Mr. Burtley,” he said in a 
low-pitched voice, “and in times like these, a man 
doesn’t enter another man’s door without raising 
his voice in advance to declare that he comes in 
peace. But you are from the lowlands—you 
wouldn’t know that.” He waved his hand in a 


62 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

gesture of belated welcome. “Have a chair,” he 
invited. 

“I represent the Tribune,” said Burtley, taking 
the proffered seat but perching nervously on its 
edge. “And I came on the train with the troops.” 

Tolliver Cornett went over and closed the door, 
and this time he latched it before he returned to his 
table. Then a grim ghost of amusement flashed 
into his ink-like eyes. 

“There aren’t any tacks in that chair you’re sit¬ 
ting on, son, are there?” he inquired and, with a 
sense of a strain mercifully relaxed, the boy laughed 
and shifted himself back more comfortably in his 
seat. 

“The fact of the matter is, sir,” he made candid 
response, “I don’t think I’d know just now whether 
I were sitting on tacks or not.” He paused, then 
went on: “I’ve been in this town only a few minutes, 
and yet it looked as though the citizenry wanted to 
lynch me at the station. I was rescued by Judge 
Malone, an accused murderer . . . and then when 
I come in to interview the prosecutor, who should 
be the protector of the innocent, I find myself look¬ 
ing down the throat of a six-gun. Such things are 
disconcerting, until one becomes acclimated.” 

Cornett nodded. His somewhat wintry smile 
had lasted until the mention of Malone’s name and 
had died on its utterance. 

“The first information you need, then,” began the 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 63 

lawyer seriously, “is this. It’s the fact that you 
represent a newspaper from down below which the 
people resent— that and the further fact that you 
came with the soldiers.” 

“But why does everyone assume that my reports 
will be biased? I haven’t taken sides, have I?” 

Cornett shook his head. 

“You don’t have to take sides. Your being here 
is offense enough,” he said. “Malone and his min¬ 
ions resent the publicity I’m giving for the outside 
world as to what is going forward here. It tears 
away the veil of privacy from their reign of terror 
and they hate interference. We mountain folk 
feel that the world beyond these ridges is unsympa¬ 
thetic. The lowlands think of the mountains only 
when the mountains are in eruption—and forget 
them utterly when they are starving quietly.” 

The newspaper man raised his head and looked 
with puzzled eyes at his informant. 

“You quote that dislike of publicity as the view¬ 
point of Malone and his crowd, sir,” he said. “And 
yet there is a feeling in your voice as though you 
shared the sentiment.” 

The lawyer nodded and rapped nervously with 
his fingers on the table-top. 

“I was a mountain man, Mr. Burtley, before I 
became a lawyer,” he answered. “It’s because I 
love this country that I’m doing a thing that in all 
likelihood marks me for death, and a thing that 


64 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

stamps me before my countrymen as a traitor to my 
blood. There is little true friendliness for us down 
there where you live easier lives. We are rough 
men here and ignorant. We disgrace our more cul¬ 
tured brethren. We are bred and reared in aeries 
and we have a high, wild love of freedom. We are 
human hawks up here, sir. The very crimes that 
brand us before the rest of the world are crimes of 
distorted virtue and warped viewpoint, rather than 
of inherent infamy.” 

“And yet it is you who are forcing these trials 
and focussing outside attention on them. Why? 
If you feel as you say, in God’s name why?” 

“Have you asked Malone that question, sir?” 

“No. I’m asking you.” 

“If you did ask him, he would tell you that I’m 
seeking to advertise myself by slandering my kind; 
that I want to go down below, where the pickings 
are richer, and practise law on the strength of a 
reputation I’ve made up here as a fearless and sen¬ 
sational prosecutor.” 

“And what do you say, sir?” 

The lawyer rose and stood towering, fiery with 
the fanaticism that makes martyrs. 

“I say that I realize I am marking myself down 
for probable death or sure exile. When this work 
ends I shall no longer be able to live here in the 
only land I know; the only land I love. If I stay I 
die, and if I go, I must make a new home among 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 65 

strangers. I must be a rough country lawyer among 
polished practitioners.” 

“That’s a pretty grim realization for a man to 
work with—but it doesn’t yet explain your motive.” 

The lawyer nodded again, and his answer was 
disarmingly simple. 

“I am prosecutor of this district. The law says 
murder must be punished.” 

“And yet,”—the young man spoke gravely and 
without intent of impertinence—“you have had pre¬ 
decessors who have lived safely.” 

“By disregarding their oaths,” Cornett caught him 
up. “Here are two men, Malone and Cropper, 
who have built up a dictatorship—and built it on 
murder. Their friends inherit the earth, rocky and 
sterile though it be. Their enemies fall in the 
creek-bed roads—by the shot from ambush—and no 
jury dares punish them. No witness dares raise his 
voice in accusation against them. What is every 
man’s business is no man’s business—but I can’t take 
refuge in such generality while I hold office.” 

He paused and Tommy Burtley leaned forward 
in his chair. 

“And so-?” he prompted in a low voice. 

“And so, at the cost of giving the truest Ameri¬ 
cans in all America a bad name, at the cost of be¬ 
coming an outcast myself, I have had to do what is 
manifestly my duty. I hate it like hell but I have 
no choice.” 






66 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

“Malone,” hazarded the young man half-timidly, 
“had the seeming of a suave and good-humored fel¬ 
low.” 

“Malone,” came the quick rejoinder, “knows that 
through the spokesmen of the press the world will 
hear this story and he angles for your sympathy. 
Malone does not, like the ignorant men he plays 
upon and uses, know only the shut-in life of the hills. 
He is well-to-do. He goes to Louisville. He vaca¬ 
tions at French Lick Springs. He has acquired the 
urbanity of the lowland politician—though here at 
home he cultivates a native rudeness.” The lawyer 
paused and his eyes blazed fiercely. “I don’t blame 
these other fellow-men of mine from adhering to 
the code of the feud. They know nothing else. 
They learned it in Indian warfare. They fed on 
it at their mothers’ breasts. Isolation and ignorance 
have blinded them into a savage exaggeration of 
clan loyalty—but Malone has no such excuse. He 
exploits their simplicity to make them his tools and 
assassins. He should pay the law’s price—he and 
Cropper both. I’m seeking to make them do it.” 

* * * 

The courthouse bell was clanging loudly, but as 
yet in the room where the drama was to be acted 
out the old pew-like benches were empty and the 
stage was unset except for squads of militiamen 
strategically disposed about the place. The great 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


6 7 

doors that gave access to the trial room were 
closed and this contraverted the custom of the coun¬ 
try which made that place a public forum open to 
the pleasure of every citizen. 

And to-day the roads that led to town were travel¬ 
led ways. Men came riding astride and in side 
saddles; men drove covered wagons, even shaggy 
and unkempt fellows who were the “branch-water 
folk” dwelling “back of beyond” came afoot and 
plodding after ox-teams. They were gathering to 
witness this duel between the old order and the new. 
And because it was not assumed that the lords of 
high dominion would tamely submit to lowland dic¬ 
tation, they brought with them the high expectancy 
of seeing fight. The concomitants of such occasions 
were not wanting: flasks of white liquor made over¬ 
night, and arm-pit holsters bulging with pistols. 

But now, because a new method was being em¬ 
ployed, this far-journeying audience was halted out¬ 
side the house of law by sentinels with crossed bay¬ 
onets, and forced to shuffle indignant feet without 
its walls. Under such indignity, antagonism took 
flame from pocket flasks, and to young Tom Burtley, 
waiting for the opening of the doors, the situation 
seemed ripe for a capricious jumping to clash and 
trouble. 

It was with a sense of relief that he eventually 
heard the brazen summons of the courthouse bell 
from the teetering cupola, though its first note made 


68 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


him start nervously. That summons meant the 
opening of the doors and either a loosening of the 
tension or a new and immediate tangent of excite¬ 
ment. 

He was standing at the elbow of one of the door¬ 
way sentries and had before his eyes the courthouse 
yard with its sullen crowds and the street with its 
line of empty hitching posts. 

Because those hitching posts stood unused, Burt- 
ley felt the more uneasy. It meant that men were 
not trusting their “ridin’ critters” to a place which 
might be raked by gun-fire. Those many mules 
and horses were tethered instead to willow branches 
down by the river, shielded by the overhang of its 
clay banks. 

Near the reporter stood Judge Malone and his 
co-defendent, Asa Cropper, and the two wore ex¬ 
pressions of sphinx-like gravity except when they 
smiled with indulgent composure, as men came up 
singly and in groups to register friendship and offer 
good wishes. 

Now along the grass-grown walk from the street 
to the steps proceeded the official party, and Tom 
Burtley caught his breath. The sheriff, carrying a 
long hickory staff, came first, and he bore himself 
as though official requirements were forcing him 
into uncongenial company. Behind him followed 
the well-tailored judge from “down below” who was 
to sit at this session of court. He was a stranger 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 69 

arriving without welcome, and though he bore him¬ 
self with the dignity of office, one could see that his 
nerves too were edgily set for possible crisis, and 
that he realized that the official family which sur¬ 
rounded him was a family at outs. Tailing the 
group and with defiant eyes that raked the elbowing 
crowds through which he uncompromisingly passed 
came Tolliver Cornett the prosecutor. 

Malone and Cropper met that gaze and returned 
it with half smiles of insolent contempt. 

The judged turned on the top step with his back 
against the unopened doors. He raised his hands 
for silence and cleared his throat to address the 
crowd, but as he faced them a growl swelled up 
from bearded throats that ran like gathering wind 
and made speech impossible. 

Judge Softridge flushed indignantly, then realized 
that this was the wrong and undiplomatic note. So 
he forced a smile and continued to gesture mildly 
for attention. 

“Ter hell with yore fotched-on law,” bellowed a 
bull-like voice from the fringe of the crowd. “Ye 
kain’t jail a man fer contempt of co’t outside ther 
co’t-house, I reckon, an’ Christ knows contempt is 
all ye gits hyarabout.” 

Before the guffaw of laughter that greeted that 
sally had passed its crest of sound, Malone had 
mounted the steps and stood beside the lowland 
judge. It was Malone who stretched his hands 


7 0 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

high for silence. It was Malone whose voice went 
out as clear and strong as a trumpet blast over the 
crowd. 

“Silence, men!” he bellowed, and there was a 
dwindling of astonished voices to gradual quiet. 

“It’s only guilty men that fear the law,” thundered 
the accused. “It’s only uncivil men that affront a 
visiting judge. This man comes here not of his own 
will but because he’s sent. We ask only what the 
law guarantees us—justice. Our friends will 
hearken to what this gentleman says, because we ask 
it. Our enemies needs must hearken because we 
bids ’em to!” 

There was instant and electric effect. The crowd 
seemed to shrink back into itself like a jackal pack 
before the angry lion. Their voices were stilled, 
and with a slight non-committal bow to the man who 
had come to try him, Malone stepped aside, and 
dropped to the level of the ground. 

“Men of Heaton County,” began Judge Softridge 
in a clear and melodious voice, “I have come to your 
county seat to hold court in compliance with the law. 
This court seeks to dispense exact justice without 
bias, without partiality. Every defendant stands 
unprejudiced here until the charges against him are 
proven. Even more, he stands entitled to the bene¬ 
fit of every reasonable doubt. No man can be 
wrongly convicted and no man is so strong that he 
can hope, save by the vindication of the evidence, to 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


7i 

escape full justice. Because there is a possibility of 
deep and passionate feeling here, no man may pass 
through these doors armed. The courtroom be¬ 
longs to the public, but everyone seeking admission 
will be searched for weapons before he crosses the 
threshold. I myself will first be searched.” The 
judge turned as he spoke and raised his hands while 
a sergeant of militia made a perfunctory gesture of 
running hands over his pockets, side, breast, and 
hip. 

But a new growl went up at the announcement and 
it was again Malone’s voice that thundered over it. 
“That’s fair enough, men. That’s what we want. 
A man lays aside his weapons when he comes into 
my dwellin’-house or yours. It’s seemly that we do 
the like in the house of the law.” 

The judge and officials of the court went first 
under the arch of crossed bayonets; the crowd 
trickled after them. But Malone and Cropper 
paused as they came for a word here and there and 
their manner was that of barons passing among loyal 
vassals. 

Again Tommy Burtley had the sense of values 
shuffled and readjusted to the tune of drama. Here 
in a place which Malone entered as the accused, and 
where he might be expected to remain with the 
humbleness of a suppliant, he stood forth as one 
indulgently permitting a farce to run its foolish 
course. He seemed almost one insisting that fret- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


72 

ful home children share their toys with a visiting 
playmate for whom they had no liking. 

Then, sitting at a small pine table with his pen¬ 
cils sharpened and his paper laid out before him, 
the reporter gazed at the dusty windows and the 
cobwebbed walls, while directly at his front, as 
shaggy and grizzled as some old sheep dog, the 
collarless sheriff pounded on the floor with his hick¬ 
ory staff and sang out sonorously, “Oyez, oyez, Co’t 
is now in order pursuant ter adjournment an’ may 
God bless this Commonwealth an’ ther honourable 
Co’t!” 


CHAPTER VI 


OUNG Tolliver Cornett paused in the early 



morning at the door of Fletch Deering’s 


house where he was living here on the land 
of “down below.^ Such a house, in the mountains, 
would have been deemed good. Here, in the blue- 
grass, it was, by the comparison of life, squalid. 
His own upland country was the land of “do-with- 
out,” and where no man is rich neither is any man 
poor, and where no man is poor none is shamefaced. 
Poverty there was the accepted lot of the pioneer 
—here it was the brand of indigence. 

Now Tolliver found his mind revolving about 
vexing readjustments of thought. Down here the 
opinion held of his own folk was not the high, proud 
opinion they held of themselves. Down here peo¬ 
ple said that the true pioneers were long dead; that 
the men of the hills were no longer forward-pushing 
Argonauts attacking a wilderness, but retarded and 
shiftless camp followers of civilization stagnating 
between an East and a West that had quickened 
their currents. 

They were anachronisms, the mountain folk. 
They were people two centuries behind their times 


73 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


74 

and their ideals were as outworn as flintlock squirrel 
guns. This boy had been used to hearing another 
gospel preached. The mountaineer looked on his 
lowland brother as a man who had fallen into the 
decadence of an enervating luxury, and Tolliver was 
discovering with surprise that the lowland brother 
had once been the pioneer too, and that since his 
frontiering he had built a culture over the scars of 
hardship and set paved streets above the blazed trail. 

Even along the waters of Troublesome, the uncle 
with whom he lived here had been indulgently ridi>< 
culed as “the disablest, shiftlessest, stand-roundin’- 
est feller on three creeks.” Here, Tolliver found 
that uncle called a “tobacco yap” which meant a 
white tenant farming tobacco land on shares and oc¬ 
cupying a social status little higher than that of the 
Negro. 

Another thing was perplexing and troubling Tol¬ 
liver even more than social distinctions. When his 
father had suggested his coming down here, “where 
there were better advantages of education,” the son 
had been too delighted to question or to seek for a 
deeper motive. Now he began to see that his father 
had also had an undeclared reason. The elder 
Cornett had been looking ahead to the time when 
he was to declare war on men so strongly intrenched 
that his own future must become precarious. He 
had been clearing his decks of non-combatants 
against that day. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


75 

“That’s why Pap sont me down hyar,” the boy 
declared to himself as he stood outside the rough 
house in which his “pore white trash” kinsman 
dwelt, and for the first time in his life contemptu¬ 
ously compared poverty with affluence. “He sont 
me down hyar because he plumb knowed the mount¬ 
ings hain’t a-goin’ ter be healthy fer no man thet 
takes ther name of Cornett.” 

He broke off on this thought, and his mouth 
twisted into a pained grimace that brought the deep 
red of mortification to his face. “He pint-blank 
knowed thet . . . an’ he knowed likewise I 

was a runt ... a disable, puny sort of body 
thet hain’t skeercely no better’n a cripple . . 
so he sont me down hyar where I’d be safe at!” 

For an instant hot tears scalded the boy’s eyes 
and he dashed them away with the back of his hand. 

“I reckon even ef I gits ter be a lawyer,” he made 
scathing self-appraisement, “I’d be a plum ridic’lous 
little rooster stantin’ up in a co’t-room, palaverin’ 
with full-sized men! I reckon ther jurymen would 
plum laugh themselves sick at me.” 

Suddenly he stiffened and clenched his hands into 
fists. 

“Thar’s one thing thet even a leetle, sawed-off 
fragglement of a man like me kin do, though, hit 
’pears like. . . . He kin ride race hosses—an’ 

albeit I told Colonel Parrish I didn’t keer nothin’ 
erbout ther money, he ’lowed a fust-class jockey 





THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


76 

sometimes gits rich. . . . Wa’al mebby atter 

all I kin use them thar riches.” 

He nodded his head sagely as he laid that germ 
of comfort to his soul. 

“Malone an’ Cropper hires th’ar killin’ done,” he 
told himself. “An’ likewise I reckon ef need be I 
kin hire my lawin’ done so fur es ther oratin’ in 
co’t’s consarned.” He smiled confidently then, and 
the furrows in his forehead cleared to smoothness 
as his youth brushed aside all difficulties in the at¬ 
tainment of a distant end. 

“So all I’ve got ter do now is jest ter git ter be 
one of ther best jockeys thet ever rid a hoss an’ ter 
be sich a smart lawyer thet them other lawyers I 
hires kain’t swindle me none. . . . Then . . . 

ef Pap don’t succeed . . . thar’ll still be a Tol¬ 

liver Cornett on ther job.” 

And that reminded him that he was almost due 
over there at the front of the farm where the morn¬ 
ing work on the training track would be under way, 
and where the whole atmosphere was, to his simple 
thinking, an atmosphere of luxuriant, almost stupe¬ 
fying wealth. 

As he followed the wagon road through the 
woodland pastures, between green wheat and young 
corn, his imagination kindled with the zest of the 
spring brilliance and warmth. He put by grim 
forebodings for fantasies and saw himself riding to 
victory after victory always astride the magnificent 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


77 

young son of Electron—for now, thank God, the 
cough had subsided and Fleetwing was rounding 
into such shape as promised a meeting of his major 
two-year-old engagements. Tolliver saw himself 
and the colt that he loved so absurdly becoming 
famous together until—vaulting ambition! A year 
hence he should perch in racing silks and tack on the 
brown when he went dancing out to parade before 
the judges for that classic which seemed to him the 
epitome of all greatness—the Kentucky Derby! 

He did not doubt himself. He asked only the 
chance. 

He knew he could ride. He could judge pace 
with an almost uncanny precision. He had the seat 
and the hands. On these points he had been assured 
by such past masters as Parrish and Creighton. The 
one great unanswered question was how he could 
ride in company and in combat. His mentors told 
him that was another proposition—and as yet, it 
was untested. 

Thinking of these things with pulses that jumped 
to excitement, he came to the training track, and 
there at the stable where the brown colt was being 
saddled stood Parrish and Creighton and a group of 
men and women whom the boy had never seen be¬ 
fore. They were plainly visitors at the Parrish 
house, and as the boy came up and heard a name, his 
pulses throbbed quicker because he recognized it as 
one belonging to an Eastern millionaire whose sue- 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


78 

cess on the turf was legendary and whose Bluegrass 
breeding farm was a show place that lay not far 
away. 

Here, then, though small in numbers, was an 
audience of celebrity before which a boy must show 
what he had, but Tolliver’s brows contracted in 
displeasure, because, standing with the group in 
breeches and boots, like those of a boy, was Shirley 
Creighton, the girl whose fastidious drawing back, 
as from an inferior, had poisoned his first entry 
into the Creighton house. 

Parrish called Tolliver over and introduced him 
as though he too were a member of the family; 
then he beckoned for Fleetwing to be led up. 

“I want you to jog and canter him a half, Tol¬ 
liver,” he instructed crisply. “Then break with him 
at the end of the half and set him down for a work¬ 
out.” He paused, then added, for the Easterner’s 
benefit: “On this track you can’t ask for the speed 
of a pasteboard footing, but try to step every fur¬ 
long in thirteen flat—and clip a bit off the last 
eighth—if you can.” 

Tolliver nodded, but he saw the Eastern turfman’s 
brows go up in an expression of good-natured skep¬ 
ticism. 

“Do you have exercise boys who can rate their 
mounts as precisely as that—even if the track per¬ 
mits the pace?” he inquired, and Parrish laughed. 

“Time him,” he answered, “and if you want the 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


79 

test even more exacting, tell Tolliver what to ride 
each furlong in and see how close he meets your re¬ 
quirements.” 

The Easterner tapped a cigarette on his wrist, 
and a twinkle of amusement lit his pupils. Then 
he met the boy’s eye. 

“Suppose you do the first eighth in thirteen and 
two fifths; then get down to thirteen—if the colt 
can manage it—and on the last furlong carry him 
as fast as he can go.” 

Again Tolliver nodded and turned to his em¬ 
ployer. 

“Do I have a pacemaker?” he inquired. 

Parrish nodded. 

“Mr. Creighton wants to work out Greentassel 
this morning. Miss Shirley is going to ride her.” 

Abruptly Tolliver’s high mood of exhilaration 
collapsed to a chilling chagrin. He had been in¬ 
vited to demonstrate for a great man of the racing 
world abilities which the great man doubted—and 
now he was being coupled in partnership with a 
girl for whom he had acquired an intense dislike 
. . a girl to whom he was “white trash.” 

But he said nothing as he turned, half sullenly, 
toward the colt and was tossed to the exercise 
saddle. 

The girl had been mounted too, and she sat her 
mount as easily and as confidently as he. As they 
started their horses away at a walk and eased into- 


8 o 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


the preliminary jog trot, then as they broke into the 
slow warming-up canter, no word passed between 
them. The boy looked only at the glistening brown 
neck and the delicately pointed ears ahead of him. 

The girl rode easy-postured but with her chin 
disdainfully uptilted, as regardless of his presence 
as though he had been a groom who had presump¬ 
tuously come alongside instead of keeping his dis¬ 
tance behind. 

Then, since they were both young, they forgot 
their absurdities of resentment as together they 
bent forward, rose in their stirrups over the withers 
of their two mounts, and lifted them out of their 
dull canter into the explosive launching of the work¬ 
out against time. 

Tolliver poised his light weight over the smooth¬ 
flowing shoulders of the brown, with his hands close 
to the bit rings and his reins double wrapped. 

The girl crouched with as professional a poise as 
his own and for a little space—a very little space 
indeed—she carried the old mare ahead of the colt. 

“Come on, why don’t you,” she taunted. “Are 
you going to let me run away from you?” 

Tolliver made no answer. He was rating his 
mount to the fifths of second and he recognized her 
purpose. Mischief was in her and she realized that 
she could not long lead him. She could not even 
cling long to his saddle skirts or ride lapped on the 
brown flanks—but she was trying to make him for- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 81 

get his whirlwind mathematics; seeking out of the 
sheer deviltry of fun to make him forget that he was 
to do the first furlong in thirteen and two fifths— 
no faster and no slower. 

Tolliver was not forgetting, but Fleetwing was 
bound by no impalpable stop-watch ticking in his 
brain. Here was opportunity for contest. He 
knew that, and his abundant strength and hurricane 
fleetness chafed at being outfooted by an inferior, 
so he fought for his head and struggled to take the 
bit away from the hands that held it under wraps. 
He sought to bolt into a runaway and cut his own 
speed-pattern. 

The first post flashed by. The mare was now 
nose-and-nose, and Tolliver gently loosened one 
wrap. Each of the next two furlongs he could 
travel two fifths of a second faster—and in the last 
he could cut loose! 

The mare tossed her tail up, then down, in the sig¬ 
nal of surrender and as she drifted rearward, the boy 
flung back a vicious challenge, across his shoulder. 

“C’mon, why don’t ye? Air ye goin’ ter let me 
run away from ye?” 

But the mare was hopelessly outfooted and trail¬ 
ing now and two more posts flashed by. Then Tol¬ 
liver let out his last wrap and settled down to a 
hand-ride. That last eighth was straightaway and 
the time ought to be almost as good as on the 
Downs. He was sustaining and supporting the 


82 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


brown head, seeming to lift and throw the speeding 
mass of horseflesh into a longer and a swifter stride, 
and the thing in his head told him that with a 
youngster which had never faced the flag and here 
on a country training track—though an unusually 
good one—he was reeling off a flat twelve. 

He turned and trotted back when he had pulled 
up, passing, with no sign of recognition, the girl who 
had been his riding mate. 

“What do you think of that colt, sir,” demanded 
Colonel Parrish, who for all his seasoned control 
found the hand that held its stop-watch trembling a 
little. “Don’t you think he’ll do?” 

The Easterner started at the question as though 
his thoughts had been elsewhere. 

“The colt—er yes—decidedly,” he answered. 
Then he laughed. “That colt is a comer,” he testi¬ 
fied, enthusiastically. “But to tell you the truth, 
I wasn’t thinking of the colt. I was too much pre¬ 
occupied with the boy.” 

Tolliver Cornett, standing a few yards away and 
busying himself with the loosening of Fleetwing’s 
girths, heard that comment, and though a saddle 
skirt curtained his dark head, he felt his cheeks burn 
with a pleasurable fire and was aware of a jumping 
elation in his pulses. The man, who had spoken of 
him with a note of astonished approval, was one 
-whose knowledge of turf values had been tempered 
in a crucible of experience. He was a man who had 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


83 

been able to strive for racing success with no handi¬ 
cap upon him. He had imported sires that had cost 
fortunes and employed jockeys at salaries which it 
made this boy dizzy to contemplate. Now he had 
expressed himself as less surprised at the speed of 
the colt than by the skill of his rider. 

But the old, cool habit of thought, which had 
come down to him from generations that had known 
hunger and privation, checked Tolliver’s burst of 
exultation. Those generations had learned to dis¬ 
trust the smile of fortune, and now, as he straight¬ 
ened up, the boy felt on him the amused eyes of the 
girl in breeches and boots, before whom he had the 
wish to appear the stoic. She, too, must have over¬ 
heard the implied compliment and he fancied that 
there was a trace of contempt in her smile—as if in 
her heart she felt that she could have ridden the 
colt as well as he had done—or better. 

He was annoyingly conscious of those eyes as he 
moved about the paddock and stable lot, and they 
pricked him into an unreasonable irritation. To his 
sensitiveness, their glance seemed to taunt him with 
the epithet which galled him: “Pore white trash— 
pore white trash!” 

Such imagined things, he told himself, should not 
be permitted to cloud a bright morning that had 
brought its wine-like taste of triumph, yet it was as 
if his hand, in grasping a prize, was more conscious 
of having pressed on a thorn. As he turned away 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


84 

he cast a sullen glance at the girl and murmured to 
himself: “I wish ter God A’mighty ye war a boy, 
stid of a gal! I’d l’arn ye ter be a sight less stuck-up 
an’ briggaty.” 

As he walked home along the woodland road, 
again his thoughts were strangely tangled up with 
an indefinable gloom and an elation that answered 
to the clear, living blue of the skies. It was a gloom 
which seemed to remind him that this was all a 
world of ease, of elegance and of heart’s desire to 
which he was an alien—a world which he had entered 
on sufferance and about which he moved as a menial 
might move through a mansion. 

If instead of Shirley Creighton, with her mocking 
superiority, her sister Cary had been there that 
morning, Tolliver knew he would have had his heart 
warmed by a cordial smile and a gracious word or 
two of congratulation. As it was, he was carrying 
back with him a feeling of triumph partly poisoned. 

“Thar hain’t no reason why I should keer a damn 
what she thinks,” he declared aloud, halting in the 
road under a tall hickory that spread its rounded 
head against the blue. “She hain’t nothin’ save only 
a gal thet esteems herself too almighty high—an’ 
hain’t got no license ter do hit. I plum hates her.” 

He spat contemptuously, and then he made an¬ 
other comment in a voice of ardour: 

“I wisht it hed been her sister thet hed been thar. 
—She’s a downright angel from heaven.” 


CHAPTER VII 


jL morning Tolliver Cornett’s head had been 



in a swirl, and from time to time he looked 


down with a thrill at the stable badge which 
he wore pinned to his sweater. They were back at 
Churchill Downs and in his old stall there stood 
Fleetwing, by Electron out of Blue Gown, who 
this afternoon was to face the flag for his first 


start. 


Of course Tolliver was not to share the glory of 
that first victory—for he felt, with the faith of cer¬ 
tainty, it would be a triumph. That honour be¬ 
longed to “Snip” Button and Tolliver tried to ban¬ 
ish envy from his heart. Stable secrets had been 
well kept since the return to the Downs and only 
the stable staff knew with what fleet speed the son 
of Electron could carry weight over a route beyond 
the demands usually made upon his juvenile divi¬ 
sion so early in the season. Now, Tolliver reflected 
joyously, the colt would go to the post almost as an 
unknown, and the betting “talent” would disregard 
him with the scorn of ignorance. 

“Wa’ll, let ’em,” mused the boy. “They won’t 


86 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

never dare neglect him herea’tter. This one time 
he’ll pay a price.” 

And yet there would not be a dollar of gain in it 
for Tolliver Cornett. Colonel Parrish had im¬ 
pressed on him that the gambling temptation car¬ 
ries the seed of ruin for the beginning jockey, and 
the boy had taken that text to heart. 

It was “Snip” Button’s undeniable right to pilot 
Fleetwing to-day, and though he acknowledged it 
the mountain lad felt a pang of heartache because 
he must watch that running from the ground. 

He had ridden as an apprentice in a few in¬ 
consequential races back there at Lexington, and 
only once had his mount been in the money—but 
then he had never been given a starter with a 
winning chance. His mounts had been put in only 
for racing workouts and not as candidates for vic¬ 
tory. 

Now he drew from a hip pocket several form 
sheets thumbed to raggedness, wherein, with official 
brevity, appeared the statistical history of the events 
in which he had taken part. On one of those “dope 
sheets” appeared a footnote that he read over again 
now with a pitching pulse, though already he knew 
it by heart. 

Black Death was pocketed and knocked off his stride at the 
start but made up three lengths of ground on the home run. 
He was cleverly piloted by T. Cornett, an apprentice who got 
him up in time to take the show money by dint of classy riding. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 87 

It was the first time he had ever seen his name in 
print and to him it was the first taste of fame. 

Now the trolley tracks were an unbroken crawl 
of overcrowded cars. The streets were freshets of 
motor traffic and the gates of Churchill Downs 
were taps through which those mighty jets of holi¬ 
day humanity poured, bubbling, into a common 
reservoir. 

Across the infield, intensely and freshly green 
under the May sun, flashed the new paint of rapidly 
filling stands and club house and the confetti-like 
colour scraps of bunting. To Tolliver Cornett the 
Lexington races had been the gayest and biggest 
spectacle that had ever entered his experience or out¬ 
done his imagination. Now as the first strains from 
the bandstand floated across to him he realized con¬ 
fusedly that this was to that as is saturnalia to a 
county fair—though of course he did not know what 
saturnalia was. 

The first four races of that opening day Tolliver 
watched from the picket fence by his stable. The 
packed stands and lawns were remote and across the 
field, but the thunder of the backstretch, where is 
the beginning of the end, was under his eye, and in 
his ears was the hurricane hoof roar of bunched and 
flying fields, with their staccato of whipping silks, 
their wailing strain of stirrup leathers, and their 
chorussed babel of boys shouting to their mounts 
and cursing each other for crowding. And these are 


88 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

intimate noises that the grandstand never hears. 
Back there, too, the tails of horses that had been 
used too hard in early pacemaking went up with 
the distress signal, and those that had been saved 
moved up in the fast procession. 

The fourth race Tolliver did not see at all for, 
trembling as he had never trembled in his own races, 
he was watching the brown colt being prepared, and 
though he was not to ride him he was at least to go 
with him across that green stretch of field and into 
the paddock beyond. He was to stand with him 
in his stall, and when post-call sounded, he was to 
lead him out, with “Snip” in the saddle, to the gate 
of the track itself. An ague of stage fright shook 
him, not for himself but for the son of Electron, and 
he found himself almost sobbing as he stroked the 
brown nose and muttered exhortations into the 
brown ear. 

Then came that avalanche of sound which he 
knew. It was the many-thousand-throated howl 
that goes along the stretch with the decisive strides 
of a finish. 

“All right, boys, lead him out!” ordered Colonel 
Parrish quietly. “He has Stall Four in the pad- 
dock.” 

With knees that knocked together, Tolliver Cor¬ 
nett found himself holding the bit ring and whisper¬ 
ing to a brown colt, while the green infield and the 
stands beyond swam giddily before his eyes. Be- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 89 

hind him came Negro rubbers with towels and sweat 
scrapers, and at his side walked Colonel Parrish. 

* * * 

The program announced this event as a half- 
mile dash for two-year-olds, with a field of eight, 
and there was only one scratched entry. 

That meant seven youngsters to line up at the 
barrier, none of them thoroughly schooled to the 
noise and excitement of the breakaway and two or 
three of them facing that ordeal for the first time. 
It was the sort of field that tries the patience of a 
starter—and frets the nerves of a jockey. It was 
the sort of field that often leaves a favourite stand¬ 
ing flatfooted at the post when the rest are away 
and on the wing. 

Now as he led the lightly blanketed Fleetwing 
around a circle under a spreading buck-eye tree on 
the paddock lawn, Tolliver’s head spun giddily. 
Once in a while he looked up at the roof of the 
jockey room where, sitting perched on the rail, were 
a half dozen boys in tack and colours, and sometimes 
when he glanced at the close-pressing crowds of 
race-going men and women he burned red with the 
realization that he was gulping nervously. “Plum 
like a gawk from back amongst ther branch-water 
folks—thet hain’t nuver seed nothin’,” he re¬ 
proached himself. 

Then came the flurry of a bugle—the saddling 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


90 

call—and Tolliver led his charge into Stall Four, 
where the blankets were stripped off, leg bandages 
finally tested, saddle cloths delicately adjusted, and 
girths re-cinched. The colt waited with his veins 
nervously upstanding under his satin coat and his 
nostrils redly distended. His flanks quivered, and 
Tolliver whisoered reassuringly to him and stroked 
his nose. 

Into the stall, nonchalant and self-complacent as 
a moving picture favourite, strolled “Snip” Button 
in the white-and-cherry quarterings of the Parrish 
silks, with his “bat” thrust into his boot top. He 
stood there waiting, and then again came the brazen 
voice of the bugle—mounting call, this—and a sten¬ 
torian command from the paddock judge, “Lead 
’em out.” 

Colonel Parrish himself gave Button a leg-up 
and the boy leaned from the saddle for his last word 
of instruction as he thrust his feet home into the 
irons. 

Tolliver, trembling so that his fingers balked, yet 
obedient to the already ingrained technique, knotted 
the rein-ends close on Fleetwing’s neck, and taking 
the bit ring led the brown out of his stall to his place 
as fourth in the procession that was to parade for 
inspection. 

At the track gate he must stand aside. His 
work was done, and from now on “Snip” Button was 
in sole command. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


9i 

As the gate swung closed after the last starter, 
a black filly, Tolliver clung to its paling and hung 
far over. 

Fleetwing, who for Tolliver always went about his 
work with a quiet and unexcited ease, was nervous 
now and just beyond the gate he plunged suddenly 
and began to curvet fretfully, thrusting for the bit. 

Button took him up quickly and, it seemed to 
Tolliver, with a needless rough-handedness, and 
drove the unarmed side of his boot heel against the 
colt’s side. 

The youngsters, in their queue of bright jackets, 
trailed past the kiosk where the judicial eye looked 
them over, and then each, dismissed with a nod, set 
out at a canter for the starting point at the half 
pole across the track. But the son of Electron was 
fuming and threatening to bolt, and Button took him 
to the outside of the track and held him close- 
reefed, so that he danced crab-wise and sweated 
fretfully as he made his way to the barrier. 

Watching these things, Tolliver fretted too. 
Fleetwing was missing him and sulking under an un¬ 
familiar bridle hand, and Fleetwing had somewhere 
under his acquired docility that dash of hell in him 
that had caused so much anxiety in the early days 
of his handling. 

“They’re at the post,” went up the shout at last, 
and the mountain boy strained forward until the 
tops of the pickets bit into his chest. 


92 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


Over there was a wheeling, plunging tangle of 
horseflesh and coloured jackets—a kaleidoscopic 
shifting. The field was never fronting one way. 
It milled and kicked and fumed, and whenever it 
seemed ready to be sent away something spun ca¬ 
priciously about and showed its tail to the starter, 
whose expostulations were drowned in the distance. 

The undisciplined babies were in a collective tan¬ 
trum. Heels lashed out, and across the infield one 
could hear the pistol-like crack of blacksnake whips. 
Exasperated “hold-on Johnnies” swung on to the 
bits and sought to hurl the disorderly youngsters 
into their places with the futility of man-power 
against horse-power. 

Tolliver’s eyes were glued on a jacket of white- 
and-cherry quarterings, and his hands were clamp¬ 
ing the gate top. He did not feel the pressure of 
men who leaned against him from behind. 

Then there was a growling outcry, as another 
effort to get them away failed and something 
wheeled, reared high and bolted—the wrong way 
of the track. 

Tolliver groaned with utter despair. It was a 
brown colt whose rider was in cherry-and-white— 
and beyond doubt it had taken the bit for a run¬ 
away. 

Those things that jockeys do, Button did. He 
sought to wrest the bit out of the clamped teeth 
and to pull the head sidewise. He carried Fleet- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


93 

wing to the extreme outside of the track—which a 
race-horse knows, by all the instincts of his training, 
is not a place dedicated to speed. But the son of 
Electron had gone bad. The rubber-coated steel of 
the bit was clamped, vise-like, in his strong teeth. 
He reached for his head and felt his power almost 
pulling Button over his withers, and then he was 
away like a cyclone that once started is beyond con¬ 
trol. With the bar in his teeth like that, it was the 
power of a horse against the strength of less than 
a hundred pounds of boy—and skill was scrapped. 

The multitude howled its derisive disgust, and 
Button, artful in his business, worked frantically 
and fought hard at the brakes. But it was only as 
he came in front of the grandstand itself, going the 
reverse way of the track, that the furious speed, 
which no one was timing, subsided to a gallop and 
fell off to a curvetting and snorting fret. 

“Take him out,” bawled a voice as the chorus 
dwindled, “he’s shot his wad. Take him out!” 

The Parrish jockey paid no heed to the yells that 
battered in his ears. He wheeled his mount and let 
the field wait over there while he made his way 
cautiously back. The longer they fretted and 
pitched about in the dust during this delay, the more 
would be taken out of those others—that had not 
already raced a half mile. But as he went, with 
the sweat running into his eyes and blinding him* 
the boy was thinking hard and foxily. This young- 






THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


94 

ster that he rode was, as he knew, precocious in 
strength and endurance. It was a bare possibility 
that even yet his untried reserves of power might 
hold the stamina to win—but that would be almost 
a miracle. At his age and at this early season, the 
asking of such a performance might endanger his 
future usefulness. Button was sore and with good 
reason. A friend had placed a heavy bet for him 
on his own mount, and that bet had not been for 
place or show but for a straight win. (“No— 
don’t spread it across the board,” he had instructed 
his commissioner, “Shoot the works flat on the 
nose.”) 

Now the race must be abandoned, so far as first 
money went, and if it was to be lost at all there was 
no sense in straining the colt’s strength or uncover¬ 
ing his abilities. The poorer his performance now, 
the better would be the price about him on his next 
time out. The public was disgusted—let them stay 
that way, for the present. 

He came back and a “Hold-on Johnny” swung to 
his bit. They had stopped caring now whether the 
brown was left at the post or not. He had for¬ 
feited all right to consideration. 

The webbing of the barrier flew up, the starting 
judge bawled “Go on!” and it was only as the field 
went plunging away that the starter’s assistant let 
go his hold on the brown’s mouth. As Fleetwing 
vaulted madly forward after the others, the “Hold- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


95 

on Johnny” speeded him with the best he could give 
from his long black whip. 

The Electron colt was winging after them, lengths 
behind at the start, yet running as though he were 
fresh from his stall, but Button took up a wrap and 
sat steady, choking off his ardour and holding him 
in his undistinguished position. He was not il¬ 
legitimately “pulling” his mount. He was merely, 
as racing ethics sanctioned, saving a colt that had 
already had enough work, and accepting the for¬ 
tunes of war. Yet Fleetwing was not trailing the 
field and finishing “absolutely” because he had to. 
With such a ride as “Snip” could have given him, 
he might even yet have overhauled the ruck. He 
might have picked up and passed the straggling 
rear division in the stretch and finished as well as 
third. “Snip” alone—and a boy who was glued to 
the paddock gate—knew what a residue of power 
he was suppressing. 

The race was run and the steaming colts and 
fillies came back to the judge’s stand. Tolliver 
Cornett was waiting there with a blanket over his 
arm and he was chalk white to the line of his hair. 
He looked at the lime semicircle, into which only 
the winner steps, and saw a red-headed boy wearing 
a green jacket ride a black filly into it and raise his 
whip-hand in salute. He saw the boy slip down and 
nestle his head against the black barrel as he loosed 
his girths and took his saddle and weight pads over 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


96 

his elbow to weigh out. Then on the outer edge of 
the horse group, he saw Fleetwing standing—“like 
a pore boy at a frolic,” as he told himself, and gulp¬ 
ing down a throat-lump that seemed strangling him, 
he went over with his blanket. 

To Tolliver Cornett, the catastrophe was real 
enough, but it was all an ache at the heart and not 
at all a wound to the purse. He was seeing outer 
things vaguely just now, and it was not until later 
that he remembered, with the focussing of realiza¬ 
tion, a scene that was being enacted as he came with 
the colt into the paddock. Paul Creighton had been 
standing there with a stricken pallour on his face, 
and Colonel Parrish had been expostulating with 
him. 

The words had registered in the boy’s ears but 
hardly penetrated his understanding. Creighton 
was voicing some lamentation that ended in . . 

cleaned out. . . . Absolutely cleaned out.” 

Parrish had caught his arm and his reply had 
been vehement to the edge of anger. 

“I warned you not to make a bet, Paul,” he ex¬ 
claimed. “I told you we didn’t know how he’d act 
at the post. . . . My God, man, can’t you ever 

throttle down your gambling passion? . . . 

Can’t you ever think of the girls?” 

Back at the barn as he scraped and rubbed and 
talked comfortingly to the colt whose fine head hung 
ingloriously, Tolliver was fighting a battle between 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 97 

the demands of a stoic code and almost uncontrol¬ 
lable tears that burned back of his eyes. To him 
this thing was raw tragedy, and Colonel Parrish, 
who had followed across the infield, stood watching 
him for a half minute before Tolliver knew that 
he was there. As he looked on, a light of amuse¬ 
ment and interest kindled in the owner’s eye. His 
own philosophy, long trained in defeat and victory, 
was unruffled, save on behalf of his friend, and even 
to that he had become in some wise innured. 

“Tolliver,” he said, and the boy straightened up 
with a violent start as if the sound of his name had 
been a whip lash, “if you had been riding that 
race—after the runway, what would you have 
done?” 

Tolliver had to gulp again before he could answer. 

“Thar wouldn’t hev been no runaway,” he de¬ 
clared wrathfully. 

“Perhaps not—but suppose there had been?” 

“Atter thet, I wouldn’t skeercely hev broke him 
down by sufferin’ him to run two races, I reckon,” 
admitted the boy reluctantly. “I reckon what Snip 
Button did war ther seemly thing ter do but-” 

He broke off and turned away. The tears were 
threatening his eyes and in defense he glowered 
sullenly. 

“Don’t take it too hard, son,” smiled Colonel 
Parrish. “This game is built on uncertainty and 
the cloud has its silver lining, after all.” 



98 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

Tolliver straightened up and his glance was ques¬ 
tioning. 

“I had a sentimental feeling that I wanted that 
colt to be unbeaten,” went on Colonel Parrish, “and 
for once I thought I had that kind of colt.” 

“Ef he’d only got away-” began Tolliver de¬ 

fensively, and the owner raised his hand. “If he’d 
gotten away,” the colonel took him up, “he’d have 
spread-eagled his field. True enough—but he 
didn’t get away.” He paused, then went on. 
“Still, it wasn’t a stake. I put him in because he 
needed a race. Except for that sentiment, I’m quite 
as willing to have him still a better horse than the 
public knows.” 

“I reckon he’s thet, all right.” 

“Next Saturday,” announced Colonel Parrish 
slowly, “is Derby Day. Chimney Swift runs for 
me in the classic with Button up. If he wins I won’t 
be astonished. If he loses I’ll be still less astonished.” 

Tolliver wasn’t passionately interested in Chim¬ 
ney Swift and his expression showed it. 

“That’s the fifth race on the card,” continued the 
breeder, “and the fourth is the Bashford Manor, 
for two-year-old colts and geldings—with a purse 
of five thousand.” 

“Ye aims ter win hit with Fleetwing—don’t ye?” 
The voice leaped excitedly, and again the Colonel 
smiled his quiet smile which was altogether a matter 
of the eyes. 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


99 

“I aim to start him,” he said, “and because he 
seems to be so damn fussy about his rider, I aim to 
give you the leg-up, son. I should say it’s your big 
chance.” 

Then, despite his stoic ethics, the tears brimmed 
over and Tolliver found himself jerking the sleeve 
of his sweater across his eyes. 


CHAPTER VIII 


T OM BURTLEY stood rolling a cigarette 
on the steps of the time-bitten old court¬ 
house at Hixon. The steep panorama that 
closed about the mountain town had lost its first 
strangeness to him now and in the place of that 
first strangeness had come something else. The 
brooding spirit of those high-shouldered ridges had 
a fashion of getting under a man’s skin, of stealing 
into a man’s heart. He had sat at the doors of 
smoky cabins up creek-bed roads and watched the 
moon come up in silver over cobalt walls, when the 
little waters sang their lullaby and the whippoor¬ 
wills called and all the night voices became softly 
vocal. At these times, a wizard beauty had come 
over him like a tide. He had heard ancient “song- 
ballets” crooned to the plaintive plucking of banjo 
and “dulcimore,” and in the witchery of it all he 
had felt preconceived ideas crumbling and altering. 
If he stayed here long enough he might become so 
“mountainized” as almost to accept certain habits 
of thought that had, a little while ago, seemed in¬ 
comprehensible. 

He was seeing how, up here, a fierce contempt for 


IOO 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


IOI 


life went hand in hand with a strange passion for 
honesty and hospitality and kindness; how, linked 
with lawlessness, went inherent decency and dignity 
. . . and he was realizing that Malone and 

Cropper had been able to victimize these souls so 
damnably because of their simple, if twisted, virtues. 

“Ye talks a heap erbout law, sonny,” an old man 
had drawled who had with a totally disarming sim¬ 
plicity led him up a laurelled ravine and shown him 
his moonshine still. “Ye talks a heap erbout law, 
an’ yit whar did these hyar laws come from in ther 
fust place—God A’mighty? Mebby some siv’ral 
on ’em did an’ a righteous man hain’t licensed ter 
tamper with ’em none. But most on ’em war jest 
projicked up by men, like you an’ me, an’ I reckon 
men like you an’ me air licensed ter spew ’em outen 
our mouths ef we’ve got a mind ter.” 

This rustic sage had paused and sent a cloud of 
tobacco smoke out between his raggedly bearded lips. 

“Mebby in some fashions we’re ornery up hyar 
an’ mebby we’re fa’r ter middlin’ godly too. I 
reckon ef ye takes ’em by an’ large folks kinderly 
balances up.” And he paused, then capped his 
preachment drily: “I’ve done tuck note thet thar 
hain’t but one p’int-blank mean fam’ly of human 
critters livin’ an thar hain’t nuver been but one—an’ 
thet’s them thet’s done come down from Adam an’ 
Eve.” 

But there in the courtroom, day after day, wit- 


102 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

nesses had evaded and shied and palpably perjured 
themselves. Court officers had brought back, with 
returns of “not found,” many commonwealth sub¬ 
poenas. Yet the story which “Old” Tolliver Cor¬ 
nett was writing into the stenographic record of that 
murder trial was one of which the ugly truth was 
inescapable, and Burtley, as he sat at his table in the 
cobwebbed courtroom, with his pencil racing, mar¬ 
velled that the face of Tom Malone remained clear 
and unconcerned—so close did the shadow of the 
gallows seem to creep and darken over the place 
where he sat. 

“Are you worried, Judge?” the scribe had once 
or twice made facetious inquiry, and the response 
had always come with a smile. 

“I’m worried right smart, sonny. P’intedly wor¬ 
rited. I’m a’fearin’ these proceedin’s ’ll drag along 
so dilitary thet I won’t get down thar to Looeyville 
in time to see the Derby run, an’ I’d done plum sot 
my heart on seein’ thet hoss race.” 

Now after long days of it, the end was near, but 
strangely enough with the inescapable evidence be¬ 
fore their eyes the native audience became more 
staunchly the partisans of the accused. This parti¬ 
sanship expressed itself in no violence of word or 
tone. It was almost deadly in its quietness, but un¬ 
mistakable and strong. 

On these things Burtley was pondering as he 
lounged at the courthouse door while the sun was 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


103 

westering, and as he thought the answer came to 
him. In the rootage of this people’s belief as to 
life and justice one principle was the tap root: it 
went down below the subsoil and wedged itself in 
the granite. 

“Let us govern ourselves, right or wrong,” ran 
their creed. “We would rather be infamously 
ruled at home than perfectly and justly from 
abroad.” 

“And after all,” mused Tommy with a new-found 
philosophy, “that’s the rock we’re built on as a na¬ 
tion—though it seems to be pretty generally for¬ 
gotten.” 

This last afternoon had shaken the young re¬ 
porter. Throughout its hours he had listened to 
the arguments of counsel. The attorneys for the 
defense, facing an array of black and proven guilt, 
had seemed almost languid; well-nigh bored. It 
was as if they knew their jury and felt all this to be 
only a formality which must be emptily observed, 
yet which would in no wise affect results. 

But Cornett had swept the boy, as he listened, 
under a cascade of forcefulness, under a blistering 
of invective and denunciation that had seemed to 
shake the corners of the house like the roar of a 
chimney fire. It had scorched and consumed with a 
crude but genuine eloquence, and it had ripped pre¬ 
tenses with the rough edge of untaught genius. 

Now came the conclusion. After the supper 


104 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


recess the jury was to be locked up for conference 
and verdict—and Malone sat inside chatting with 
friends as though he were holding a reception. 

Up the street where razor-backed hogs wallowed 
in mudholes lounged the procession of venire-men. 
Most of them were shirt-sleeved and one or two of 
them walked in bare feet. At their head, also coat¬ 
less and shaggy-maned, came the sheriff carrying the 
long staff cut with a jack-knife from a hickory sap¬ 
ling and with the arm-pit holster of his pistol out¬ 
side his open vest. 

Again the bell in the cupola clanged its summons, 
as that grim parade filed into the jury room armed 
with instructions of the judge, which no device of 
our law could prevent their disregarding, once the 
door closed on their sacred privacy. 

“How do you feel about it?” demanded Tom 
Burtley of Tolliver Cornett who stood, picturesque 
in his flapping coat-skirts and his lank height by his 
table, three strides from the chair in which the de¬ 
fendant Malone slouched impassive. 

“I feel,” answered Cornett simply, yet with a 
voice of imprisoned passion, “that the man is guilty 
as hell and his guilt proven beyond reasonable doubt. 
That ought to be enough.” He broke off and raised 
a clenched hand to let it fall inertly again at his 
side. “But proving a case doesn’t mean a convic¬ 
tion in this district—and after all it is I, not he, 
whose fate is being decided in that jury room.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 105 

“You!” Burtley questioned, though he thought 
he understood. “You’re not on trial here.” 

“If they free him,” came the weary response, 
“they might as well hang me. I’ve declared war 
and it’s war without quarter. I’m reasonably sure 
of life so long as the soldiers stay—and possibly 
long enough thereafter to let the excitement die 
down. After that-” he shrugged his shoulders. 

“They can hardly refuse to convict—even here,” 
protested Burtley, and as he spoke, though the panel 
had been out less than five minutes, a rap sounded 
on the door of the jury room, echoed by a gavel- 
rap from the Bench. 

“There’s your answer,” announced Cornett, sink¬ 
ing his voice to a bitterly ironical undertone. “It 
didn’t take them long to decide a question that 
has been thrashed out before them for weeks, did 
it?” 

The shaggy line of men filed slouchingly into the 
courtroom and stood in a semicircle before the dais, 
while the voice of the judge made formal inquiry: 
“Gentlemen, have you arrived at a verdict?” 

The foreman nodded and handed a slip of paper 
to the clerk, and the clerk, dispensing with a full 
reading, announced briefly, “Not Guilty.” 

By his table Tolliver Cornett stood gathering his 
papers and his law books. He said nothing but his 
face was dead white and in his eyes for an instant 
the reporter read such a look as might have been 



106 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

expected there had the words of the foreman been his 
own death sentence. 

* * * 

“The soldiers are breaking camp this morning, 
sir, and I must go back with them this afternoon. 
I’ve come to say good-bye.” 

Young Burtley had not entered Tolliver Cornett’s 
law office this morning without knocking. The 
weeks of his stay here had taught him some lessons. 

He had found the prosecutor standing by the win¬ 
dow of the room with hands gripped at his back, 
looking off at the purple of the mountain-tops, and 
he looked out of eyes that were tired to desperation, 
yet doggedly unyielding. 

“I’m glad you dropped in on me, son, for a word 
of farewell,” came the slow acknowledgment of the 
older man. “You have seen the court debauched 
and the jury system degraded, and through your 
eyes you have made the outside world see something 
of it, too. Perhaps some day the people may care 
enough to stop such things.” 

“I didn’t do much,” began Tommy modestly, but 
the other shook his head. 

“You did a great deal that was well worth doing. 
There were times when I feared that, even for you, 
the incident might not end safely.” 

“And you, sir-?” 

The lawyer raised his hands and let them fall 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 107 

again at his side. It was his gesture for passing 
with philosophy under the yoke of the inevitable. 

“My job isn’t done yet,” he said. “It’s just be¬ 
ginning. I can only watch my step and hope for 
luck.” 

“But surely duty doesn’t flog a man on forever to 
undertake the impossible!” protested the young low- 
lander with some heat. “You’ve made a conscien¬ 
tious effort, and if you’ve failed, it’s not your fault. 
Now, you can, with a good conscience, call quits. 
Your own life is worth something to the community 
and to your family.” 

The lawyer’s face hardened to a stonier grimness. 
He stood for a moment quietly as his eyes kindled,, 
and then a molten wrath broke from them. 

This was the figure of a man grotesquely thorough 
in his passions, alike in his devotion and his hates, 
and when he spoke again the reporter knew that 
those passions could be broken only under the 
sledge of actual destruction. 

“Call quits, did you say?” he echoed incredu¬ 
lously, as though he could not believe a friend had 
expressed so craven a sentiment. “Call quits with 
the man whose hand I refused to take when court 
adjourned—the man who means to murder me for 
challenging his infamies? Young man, I hardly 
think I have heard you aright.” 

“You have made your fight, sir. It’s a lost cause 


now. 


108 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

“By God, no!” The voice rang out like a battle 
shout. “Most of the great causes have been lost— 
or all but lost—before they were won. When I go 
down, I’m going down in the hell of a fight—not 
tamely.” He broke off and stood with clenched 
hands and head thrown back; with eyes that were 
black pits of jetty flame. 

“You have seen behind the curtain here. You 
have seen a mockery made of the law because the 
murderer owned the court: because every official 
upon whom I had the right to depend was his slave 
and because every witness perjured himself out of 
terror. Yet I know beyond doubt that more than 
half of those witnesses would have gladly told the 
truth had they dared. That same jury panel would 
have sent Malone to the gallows with a hurrah of 
fervour, if every member hadn’t known he must 
ride home afterward, along laurel hells where death 
waited.” Again the vibrant voice broke off and 
the lawyer’s chest heaved to a mighty emotion. 

“And am I to let this country rest under such a 
curse of terror? Am I to doom every wife in the 
mountains to live waiting always for the shadow of 
murder to fall on her home and children?” 

“Yet what more can you do?” 

Cornett paced the floor until he had commanded 
his wrath, then in a quieter voice he said: “The 
next phase of my fight is before the state assembly. 
A law must be passed permitting change of venue on 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


109 

the motion of the Commonwealth in such cases. 
Our present statutes give no such permission. It 
must be possible to take the cock off his own dung¬ 
hill, to compel him to face an unterrified jury. That 
is my next campaign. Softridge has pledged his 
help. My other cases won’t be tried here. I can 
bide my time, but, before God, I don’t quit!” 


CHAPTER IX 


TROSS the narrow street from the court¬ 



house, at that same moment, and in a room 


above the place which bore the legend, 
“Malone’s Mammoth General Store,” another 
man was looking on at the entraining preparations 
of the troops with a different emotion. 

Tom Malone stood in that upper room alone. 
He had just dismissed Cropper, who was riding 
back to his own house at the head of Staghorn, and 
was waiting for another confidential associate. 

He heard a step on the stair and then a rap at 
the door and his voice gave brief permission to 
enter. 

The man who came in was not yet thirty and he 
presented to the eye little that was pleasing of 
aspect. His hair was long and moist and his face 
sneering and malevolent. His breath reeked of 
raw and illicit whiskey . . . and his name had 

been often spoken from the witness stand in the 
days that had just ended. 

The newcomer closed the door behind him and 
came cautiously over to the table. His voice when 


no 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE hi 

he spoke was low, but atremble with suppression of 
passion. 

“I ’lowed ye’d be sendin’ atter me, Tom,” he an¬ 
nounced tersely, “so I come along without bein’ 
fotched.” 

“Why did you ’low that, Bert?” inquired the 
former county judge suavely, and the somewhat in¬ 
flamed eyes of the younger man glittered sharply. 

“Ther damned milishymen air goin’ away, hain’t 
they? I reckon ye aims ter hev me git Tolliver 
Cornett now, don’t ye?” 

Malone raised his brows and affected a large sur¬ 
prise. 

“Why should I want you to get Cornett?” he 
demanded. “He’s brewed his little pot of broth— 
an’ scalded himself, ain’t he? I’ve done come clear, 
haven’t I? He didn’t avail in seekin’ ter hamper 
me in the penitenshery, did he ? Seems like I ought 
to be fair to middlin’ satisfied.” 

Incredulity filled the eyes of Bert Heaton. He 
stood staring with a jaw that dropped. This was 
a reversal of all precedent. Heretofore a man had 
challenged the authority of the Malones and the 
Croppers at his peril, and failing of success, had 
paid the price. Bert Heaton knew because more 
than once he had himself been designated to exact 
that payment. 

A man does not perform such tasks for the love 
of the butcher’s trade. Bert had, in the first place, 


112 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


accepted his responsibilities and their attendant 
perils only because he feared his master more than 
the dangers to which obedience committed him. 
Now it might have been expected that his face would 
have cleared from its ill-temper to the more sunny 
aspect of relief. 

But it was not so. The man was shaken by a 
gusty rage that burned in his eyes and snarled at his 
lips, revealing an ugly and yellowed raggedness of 
teeth. His breath laboured in his throat and chest 
and he came closer and rested his knuckles on the 
top of the table that separated him from Tom 
Malone. 

“Afore this hyar trial come on,” he declared, 
speaking gaspingly in his tenseness and larding his 
sentences with profuse obscenities, “ye posted me 
up hyar in this same room, an’ ye giv’ me a shot-gun 
loaded with buck, ter git thet ill-begotten bird when 
he went by.” 

“And,” observed Malone drily, “you failed to get 
him.” 

“He war a-totin’ a baby in his arms,” the assassin 
made reminder, “an’ I warn’t hired ter slay young 
children. I’d done besought ye, in ther fust place, 
ter let me hev a rifle-gun ’stid of a scatter-gun—an’ 
yit ye faulted me like all hell fer holdin’ my hand 
thet time. Ye censured me an’ tongue-lashed me. 
Ye said thar warn’t no sense in bein’ so persnicketty 
erbout ther brat—he’d hev ter be kilt some day any- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 113 

how because he war ther breed thet needed killin’. 
Like es not ye disremembers all thet, Tom?” 

“Maybe I do, Bert.” The words came with the 
chill of an ice shower. “An’ maybe if I disremem¬ 
bers it, it might be as well for you to do likewise.” 

“Mebby so, an’ by Christ, mebby not!” 

Here in Hixon County, the germ of a new and 
disquieting development seemed to be incubating. 
Here was a murder hireling speaking in a tone of 
bold insolence that savoured of mutiny, and Tom 
Malone straightened and stiffened. He leaned for¬ 
ward until his eyes were close to those of his rebel¬ 
lious underling, and from them rained blistering 
torrents of wrath. But his tone was chillingly cool. 

“Bert Heaton,” he inquired, dropping into the dia¬ 
lect beyond the wont of his quieter moments and 
into a nasal roughness of voice, “did ye fare up hyar 
ter censure me an’ backbite me? Since when did ye 
git ter be so survigrous strong thet ye dasts ter lay 
down ther law ter me? Ef I spoke ther word ter- 
day, ye’d lay dead afore sun-up, an’ full well ye 
knows hit. When I wants a dog of mine ter come 
I whistles him up—an’ until I whistles ye kin scratch 
at yore fleas outside.” 

But this seemed to be a new Bert Heaton, and 
though he flinched, hound-like from habit, under the 
verbal lash, he speedily recovered himself and thrust 
his bloodshot eyes close again. 

“Does ye know what this Cornett aims ter do?” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


114 

he demanded. “He aims ter git thet furrin’ jedge 
workin’ down below. He aims ter bile his next 
kittle in ther legislater an’ ter change ther law so 
they kind drag us down an’ try us in ther lowland 
country, whar every man disgusts ther mountings. 
Ye says ye kin hev me kilt ternight—an’ thet’s 
gospel. Likewise I kin kill you ternight—an’ once 
weuns, thet hev done hung tergether, falls apart, 
we’ll all fare ter ther gallows, sure as hell’s hot.” 

Malone felt for the first time that his victory 
there in court had not been complete. Its develop¬ 
ments left in the consciousness of his henchmen an 
inkling of their own powers in rebellion, but to ac¬ 
knowledge such a thing would be weak-hearted folly. 

“Bert,” he said, “hearken ter me right heedful. 
I’ve done kept ye outen jail an’ I’ve done supported 
ye. If ye aims ter fall out with me, do hit now. 
Ye’ve got a short gun thar under yore arm pit. I 
hain’t armed. But onlessen ye kills me hyar an’ 
now don’t nuver open yore face ter yap at me ergin, 
withouten ye seeks death.” 

He broke off his ultimatum and stood waiting 
while, for a taut interval, the two glared across the 
narrow table. 

Bert Heaton’s hand crept toward his holster and 
touched the pistol grip; then it crept aimlessly away 
again. His eyes faltered and dropped—because, 
as Malone knew, a man can control others, whether 
in good or evil mastery, only by inherent power, and 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


ii 5 

he had both tested and proven that power of con¬ 
trol in himself. And a man murders for hire only 
because he is weak and must rest in the shade of a 
greater strength—and such was Heaton. 

So Malone went through these elongated moments 
when he was physically at the mercy of this en¬ 
raged minion, with lashes that never flickered and 
a smile that never lost its satirical ascendancy, and 
when he knew that the weaker man had wilted, his 
voice became almost conciliatory. 

“Now listen, son,” he said. “Ye’ve done dis¬ 
pleasured me but I forgives ye because ye’ve done 
served me faithful aforetimes. Why air ye so ram¬ 
pageous ter kill an enemy thet’s a’ready licked?” 

“Because he hain’t licked, Tom.” The answer 
came quickly though the manner was now a waver¬ 
ing between the cringing and the rebellious. “Tol¬ 
liver Cornett hain’t nuver licked till he’s dead. In 
this hyar last trial he war agoin’ atter you. Next 
time hit’ll be me too. He kain’t handily git his wit¬ 
nesses ter talk free on ther witness cheer, but he 
knows I laid in a la’rel-hell fer Red MacVey . . . 
an’ once he gits his co’t settin’ down below he’ll 
plum prove hit. He’ll hev me es dead ter rights 
es a fish on a mounting top.” 

The man broke off gaspingly, then went hurriedly 
on again. Palpable terror was riding him with 
spur and lash. 

“Ef he lives another year hit means I’ll hang. I 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


ii 6 

done them things fer you an’ now ye aims ter let him 
live long ernough ter ruin me. All right, Tom. I 
hain’t nuver kilt a man afore onlessen ye bade me 
ter do hit. Now, ef need be, I reckon I kin ack 
fer myself.” 

For a few balanced moments Tom Malone stood 
reflective, then he nodded, and his voice was as in¬ 
gratiating as the purr of a cream-fed kitten. 

“Bert,” he said, “Cornett doesn’t know sich a 
lavish about ye as what I knows. If ye breaks 
with me, I don’t handily see how ye kin go free fer 
long. I kin hang ye or penitenshery ye at will, an’ 
albeit I likes ye, I’ll be compelled ter ack thetaway 
ef ye defies me. I’m plum bound ter keep my rules. 
Nonetheless, ye’re right in a fashion an’ whilst I 
gin’rally keeps my own counsel ontil I’m ready ter 
talk, I’m a’goin’ ter tell ye a thing now thet no other 
man don’t know.” 

“I’m hearkenin’ ter ye,” came the non-committal 
response. 

Tom Malone went over and looked out of the 
window. He stood there for a matter of minutes 
in deep preoccupation; then he wheeled. 

“I thought ye confidenced me, Bert,” he said qui¬ 
etly. “I thought ye knowed full well thet I hain’t 
nuver let no man git away yit thet I’d done marked 
down ter die.” He paused and a black light blazed 
in his eyes. 

“I’ve done marked Tolliver Cornett down ter 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 117 

die. I hain’t a grudge-bearin’ man but hit’s plum 
needful fer him ter die—albeit I aims ter use my 
own judgment es ter when hit comes ter pass—an’ 
hit kain’t be right now.” 

“Why kain’t hit?” 

“Because ther soldiers air jest goin’ away—an’ 
we don’t seek ter hev ’em come back in no tormentin’ 
haste. Because ther newspapers down below hev 
done been advertisin’ our lawlessness ter all men.” 

“Ter hell with ther furriners!” 

“Thet’s right, too, Bert. But they fergits quick. 
Come corn-shuckin’ time, they won’t remember Tol¬ 
liver Cornett no more—an’ when they fergits him 
I’ll send fer ye ergin, Bert. Till thet day we kin 
both of us bide our time.” 

“An’ in thet time what-all kin he do?” 

“Mebby not much more then I kin do, Bert, ef ye 
pushes me too fur. Ef ye’d been smarter then me, 
son, mebby ye might be whar I am now. As things 
stand, ye’ve either got ter go on confidencin’ me—or 
else hev me fer an enemy ’stid of a frien’.” 

The man whose status in life had depended on his 
marvellous skill as a marksman seemed to shrink 
with a realization of relative powers. 

“I hain’t seekin’ ter fault ye none, Tom,” he made 
sheepish confession. “I only wanted ter make sure 
ye hedn’t done been beguiled inter lettin’ Cornett 
live on an’ run too free.” 

“I hain’t beguiled none, Bert. I’ve done writ 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


118 

Cornett’s name down ter die. Only I aims ter use 
some horse-sense afore I fixes on ther day.” 

Heaton jerked his head in a nod of forced assent 
and went out, closing the door softly behind him. 

* * * 

For the race-track at Churchill Downs there is 
one day in the year and its name is Derby Day. If 
one reads the programme, one sees that the first 
field goes to the post at two-thirty, but the large 
excitement and the abounding romance begin with 
dawn. 

Every barn that shelters under its roof a three- 
year-old colt or filly royal enough for eligibility is 
up and making ready from daybreak. 

From the Parrish stables Chimney Swift was to 
carry the white-and-cherry quarterings into the 
melee with a fair chance of victory, and in public 
talk his name was a coin that passed current from 
tongue to tongue. So overshadowing is the interest 
of this classic race, that every lesser contest on the 
day’s card is eclipsed into a triviality of contrast. 
But Colonel Parrish himself realized that if, in 
Chimney Swift, he saddled the Derby winner to¬ 
day, it would be a windfall of golden fortune due 
to the caprice of racing luck. There were colts 
there that should outfoot Chimney Swift over 
the mile-and-a-quarter route unless some break 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 119 

of chance favoured him. He would hardly come 
home victorious unless some better youngster was 
pocketed or bumped, or unless some jockey lost his 
head and threw the race away. 

Yet he himself was not greatly disturbed by those 
realizations. He felt sure that his colt would run 
in the money—and so would more than “pay for 
his groceries,” and later in the season, with more 
work under his girth, he would be apt to win almost 
equally coveted handicaps. To-day he hoped to 
surprise the racing world. To-day, with the big 
event eclipsing lesser things in general attention, his 
own sentiment was wrapped up in the capture of the 
Bashford Manor Stakes and in springing on an un¬ 
suspecting public a claimant for preeminence in the 
two-year-old division. 

The colonel thought sanely of the matter, but the 
boy who was to ride the juvenile had been in a state 
of exaltation that bordered on unbalance. Last 
night he had brought his blanket out of his own 
sleeping quarters and had spread it on the straw 
against the wall of Fleetwing’s stall. 

Lying there, almost under the heels of a horse 
that had once been accounted a man-killer, he had 
had a nervous chill, due to excitement and hope. He 
had shaken it out with his teeth chattering, wakeful, 
until the night had spent itself far along, and sleep 
crept over him near dawn. 

Tolliver Cornett had awakened from that rest- 


120 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


lessness with jumpy nerves but with the assurance 
of triumph, and though his cheeks were pale and his 
pulses jerking, he had managed to get through the 
day’s early hours with an outward seeming of la¬ 
conic calm. 

But that morning, freshly back from the moun¬ 
tains, young Tom Burtley came out to the track. 
He had many news points to cover, but before visit¬ 
ing them he went to the Parrish barn to seek out 
young Cornett and deliver his message. 

“So he lost out?” said the boy dismally. “I 
feared me he didn’t hev no real chanst—an’ yit I 
didn’t skeercely dast ter lay by hope.” 

“He’s not through yet,” Tommy gave reassur¬ 
ance. “He has an idea of a legislative amendment 
that will perhaps open the whole matter up again.” 

The boy, who had been palpitating with antici¬ 
pation, who had felt the magic of that spring morn¬ 
ing with its promise of great achievement, seemed to 
shrink into himself, and to shudder with some grim 
sense of foresight. 

“He’s not through yit,” he echoed slowly. “An’ 
yit I mistrusts he’s done been doomed.” 

“Why?” demanded the reporter militantly. “My 
own opinion is that though he’s fighting against 
odds he’s got them on the run. He made a won¬ 
derful fight and at the end of the trial Malone came 
up and offered to shake hands. Your father re¬ 
fused.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 121 

The boy stood wriggling the toe of his shoe in 
the dust. 

“When he did thet,” he declared with a sombre 
conviction, “he knowed he war elected ter die. 
Malone’s jest a-waitin’ fer ther soldiers ter git 
away. I reckon he’s done a’ready give his orders 
ter ther hired man he’s picked out fer his killin’!” 

He broke off and his body was suddenly shaken. 
“But I comes atter him,” he declared passionately. 
“An’ I reckon he won’t die withouten he’s paid fer.” 

He stood there against the background of the 
freshly white-washed barn and on the verge of his 
own great opportunity and across the sparkle and 
the throb of it, the intoxication of it, fell the sha¬ 
dow of his mountain heritage. His thin face be¬ 
came gray and his eyes burned into momentary 
ferocity. 


CHAPTER X 


I T WAS as well for the apprentice jockey and 
the colours he wore that day that his thoughts 
were not permitted to follow, without a break, 
that sinister thread of reflection. The break came 
with a forenoon visit to the barn by Paul Creighton 
and his two daughters. 

In the eyes of the man was that restiveness that 
haunts the face of the drunkard when he smells 
strong drink. This was the day of days to the 
lover of the blood horse, and the pockets of this 
devotee, called “King” Creighton in the memory of 
a vanished magnificence, were empty. He had no 
business being there at all. Even the travelling 
and hotel expenses incurred in the trip from the 
Bluegrass farm had been an extravagance which 
prudence should have forbidden. Last week he 
had come to Louisville alone and gone home 
stripped of savings that could ill be spared. These 
savings were the fruit of economies that Cary had 
contrived and carried through; fruits gleaned from 
a sterile orchard. Every dollar of the plunging bet 
that Fleetwing had tossed away had been dedi¬ 
cated in advance by the girl to some needed use, and 


122 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 123 

if “King” Creighton’s daughters were with him now 
it was only because Cary had not been able to dis¬ 
suade him from coming, and had not dared to let 
him come alone. 

The dark-haired, sloe-eyed beauty of the girl was 
perhaps enhanced to-day rather than marred by the 
pallour of her face. For Cary Creighton had 
never grown so accustomed to the moral infirmities 
of her wastrel father that they had lost their power 
of hurting her with fresh stings of disillusionment. 
She had cried a good deal during the last week— 
but only when she was alone. The little comforts 
that the savings were to have provided gained di¬ 
mension and importance in her thoughts now that 
they were gone, swallowed in the maw of the “iron 
men.” Also, she knew her father well enough to 
feel sure that if he could borrow money to-day he 
would plunge afresh in his optimist’s effort to make 
those same “iron men” disgorge and recoup him. 
She was here to see that he had no chance to make 
that vain gesture. 

Because she had seen no way to insist on coming 
herself without consenting to Shirley’s coming, too, 
the younger daughter was with them—and the 
younger daughter came unburdened with any heavi¬ 
ness of responsibility. Her eyes were dancing with 
the sun and her lips were smiling as the three stood 
near the stalls where Chimney Swift and Fleetwing 
munched their oats. 


124 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


Tolliver Cornett looked up from his brooding at 
their arrival. Poverty’s pinch was a thing he could 
understand. The onerous weight of responsibility 
was a matter with which he could sympathize. 
Now, at a glance, he read in Cary’s eyes the under¬ 
lying significance of this visit to the track, and upon 
Cary he looked with a sort of dumb worship. To 
the younger sister he nodded with a grudging 
civility that masked a feeling close-kinned to live 
animosity. The dance of mischief in her eyes was, 
to his sober cast of thought, an unending mockery, 
a superior taunt—but he guessed what Paul Creigh¬ 
ton’s “cleaning out” had meant to her sister, and for 
a moment he forgot the threat that hung, by a hair, 
over his father’s head back there in the hills. 

It was when they had gone away again that the 
lad gripped his quaking courage in both hands and 
sought out Colonel Parrish. 

Tolliver gulped, turned lobster-red, then blurted 
out: “I knows full well a jockey hadn’t ought ter 
gamble on a race he’s ridin’—but I’ve got some 
money cornin’ ter me, hain’t I?” 

Colonel Parrish stood regarding the small figure 
with an incredulous disappointment. After a little 
he nodded his head. 

“Yes, there’s pay due you—or there will be Mon¬ 
day. But I’m disappointed, Tolliver, if the gam¬ 
bling bee has stung you. You can’t make a bet with 
my consent.” 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 125 

The red embarrassment on the boy’s cheeks deep¬ 
ened and he gulped in a paroxysm of effort. It was 
hard to talk. 

“Hit hain’t for myself,” he said haltingly. “But 
I reckon I owes right smart ter Mr. Creighton fer 
all he’s done l’arned me erbout hosses. 

He lost money ther fust time Fleetwing started—* 
an’ terday Fleetwing’s p’intedly bounden ter win at 
long odds. . . . Like es not he hain’t got noth¬ 

in’ left ter bet.” 

Colonel Parrish stood inquisitorially searching 
the face of this young employee. He thought he 
understood but wanted to make Tolliver put it into 
words. 

“Do you think, son,” he inquired kindly enough, 
“that Mr. Creighton would accept money you—or 
any one else—had bet for him?” 

Speech seemed to have deserted Tolliver Cor¬ 
nett, but he wrestled with the problem of be¬ 
coming articulate as one might worry with a 
knotted string and at last he got his answer into 
words: 

“I knows he wouldn’t take charity from me. But 
ef he thought hit war you thet hed done bet ther 
money-mebby then hit mout be diff’rent. I lowed 
mebby you’d see ter hit fer me.” 

The turfman did not smile, but after a little he 
inquired quietly: “Which girl is it, son, that you 
don’t want to see suffer from her father’s reckless- 




126 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

ness? I know it’s not Paul Creighton himself that 
you’re troubling your head about.” 

Tolliver twisted his toe in the cinders. 

“Hit’s Miss Cary . . . she’s an angel,” he 

burst out with eruptive impetuosity of confession. 
“Es fer ther other gal I plum hates her—she belit¬ 
tles me an’ disgusts me every time she claps eyes on 
me. But Miss Cary-” He broke off abruptly. 

Colonel Parrish nodded. 

“Cary had a birthday yesterday, Tolliver,” he 
said. “When you go to the post to-day I’m going 
to hand her an envelope for an anniversary gift. 
There’ll be a ticket in that envelope on Fleetwing 
to win . . . but if the ticket cashes, it will 

have to be you who brings it about. So my birthday 
gift won’t be worth much unless you see to it.” 

Tolliver Cornett did not, on this day of days, 
watch the running of the first races from across the 
track. To-day, with all the boys who were to have 
mounts in the six events of the card, he had an¬ 
swered roll-call in the jockey room. From now un¬ 
til his duties ended he was a prisoner under lock and 
key by the law which the stewards lay down to 
isolate riders precisely as if they were jurors. It 
was an imprisonment which he could endure without 
grievance and, looking smaller than in his street 
clothes, he perched on the rail atop his place of 
confinement, his thin legs encased in soft racing 
boots and the white breeches of his uniform—his 





THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


127 

body jacketed in the Parrish silks of white-and- 
cherry quarterings. 

Below him seethed a multitudinous ferment in 
which individual entities were lost. To-day the 
sporting world had eyes for this spot only. Those 
measureless crowds tallied not in thousands but in 
scores of thousands, congested stands and lawns and 
overflowed into the infield, where they sweated and 
elbowed while squads of mounted police rode them 
back after the manner of cossacks, to prevent them 
from carrying away the fences. Only in the boxes 
and favoured reservations of the club house could 
shoulders swing free or lungs breathe unrestrictedly. 
The betting enclosures were maelstroms of slow and 
panting battle, yet over the whole yeasty ferment 
lay a golden sunlight, and the thousands laughed as 
they jostled and bared their heads to the light 
breeze. Pennants took the air with light palpita¬ 
tions of colour and as one brass band fell off its 
blaring gaiety, another took up its jazzing relay. 

Between compact human walls the track itself lay 
smooth and clear and lightning fast, and the an¬ 
nouncement boards loomed high and readable. 

The magnet that had drawn them there in motor 
cars and trolleys and on foot in a constant stream 
since early morning was that event which tradition 
has hallowed since “the little red hoss,” Aristides, 
won its first running. The lure that had beckoned 
in a score of special trains, that had dumped a sec- 




128 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


ond townful on top of a city, and laid siege to every 
hotel until it closed its doors in despair, was the 
Kentucky Derby. That was a race which Tolliver 
Cornett was to watch from the ground, and yet 
when its field paraded to the post, the day would 
for him be ended, in inexpressible triumph or unut¬ 
terable defeat. 

Now he perched there on the jockey-house roof- 
gallery and looked down on it all. While the other 
boys chattered wisely in the argot of their calling, 
he sat as nearly aloof as the confinement of the quar¬ 
ters permitted and schooled his face into an iron 
quiet, while his heart and arteries were aflood with 
quicksilver. 

Through the feverish excitement of that after¬ 
noon, Tolliver had maintained a stolid front, yet 
under that masquerade of manner he wondered 
whether he could ride at all and gravely doubted it. 
Now, when opportunity had come, he feared that 
his delicate judgment of pace had gone dead in his 
brain. He felt that his surety of hand had deserted 
him, and so unsteady was his confidence that if 
Fleetwing lunged, in all that uproar, he thought he 
must fall from the saddle. 

Sitting here over the heads of the slowly eddying 
multitude, and looking down on the mad game in 
which more than a half million dollars would change 
hands to-day, he was seeing a picture strangely re¬ 
mote from the spirit of his surroundings. 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


129 

His fancy was picturing a steep upheaval of for¬ 
ested peaks, and he was seeing a lonely man there 
who had defied powers greater than his strength; 
who had made a bitter fight and lost it—who per¬ 
haps faced a bitterer consequence of reprisal. The 
spectre of assassination for that man haunted Tol¬ 
liver as he sat in his white-and-cherry motley, and 
he knew now that it had haunted his father too. 
That was why he had been sent away to this safer 
life, which already seemed his natural life. 

There was nothing he could do about it now, just 
as there was nothing which he would leave undone 
if the nightmare turned to truth; but to-day his job 
lay here, and to-day his bridle hand mustn’t trem¬ 
ble with vague premonitions nor his racing judg¬ 
ment be muddled with forebodings and brood- 
ings. 

Yet the first and second races had seemed to swim 
through his consciousness as things taking place at 
a great and nebulous distance, and a clammy, de¬ 
spairing sweat stole out on the boy’s face. He 
who had been armoured in self-confidence was in a 
blue funk. He wondered whether he oughtn’t to 
confess to Colonel Parrish that he had crumpled 
under the strain and that for him to take a horse 
out there to-day meant only to disgrace himself and 
sacrifice the mount’s chances of victory. 

The other boys who had ridden in those first 
races had come back hot and dust-caked into the 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


130 

jockey room. Their voices rose loud and conten¬ 
tious as they wrangled in post mortems over issues 
that were already dead, but above them, on the 
roof, Tolliver Cornett slumped in this strange 
apathy that he had never known before. 

“It’s a hugeous big crowd ter shame myself 
afore,” he told himself shudderingly. 

Then it was time to go below and make ready, 
and he stumbled down the ladder as if going to 
ordeal instead of victory. He found his valet ad¬ 
justing his wrist bands and tying the tape of his 
peaked cap and mounted the scales as if in a dream 
with his light saddle and weight pads over his fore¬ 
arm. He almost quailed before the inquisitorial 
eyes of the official who shot at him perfunctory 
questions of equipment. 

“Bat?” . . . “Yes, sir.” . . . “Spurs?” 

. . . “Yes, sir.” . . . “Blinkers?” 

Tolliver straightened, as if in resentment for a 
blow, as he shot back his truculent answer, “No,” 
and this time he omitted the deferential “Sir.” 

Now blinkers are also known as the rogue’s 
badge, and they put their blindfolding restrictions 
only on the bad actor who cannot be trusted to look 
bravely at his adversaries. They permit him to 
see only straight ahead and deny him side vision, 
and when a horse runs in blinkers he tacitly makes 
confession that no confidence in his common sense 
follows him. ... At such an imputation for 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


131 

Fleetwing the boy shot out his reply in a vocal spurt 
of wrath. 

That little prickling seemed to bring him back to 
sanity—to focus him to steadiness. His nerves 
stopped jumping and became quiet. His eye ceased 
to wander and brightened, and now in his ears 
sounded the uproar of a finish and his race was next. 

He waited in a sort of suspended animation, yet 
with a sense of keenness, and when the bugle from 
the track sounded its fanfare and the voice inside 
shouted, “Boys out,” he was among the first to pass 
through the door and make his way along the tan- 
bark to the saddling paddock. 

These slight, silk-clad lads walked between walls 
of men and women from the four quarters of the 
continent, but to Tolliver Cornett, just now, they 
were no more individual than fence-posts would 
have been. At the door of the stall, he saw Colonel 
Parrish, and standing with him the Eastern mil¬ 
lionaire who had, on that other day, skeptically set 
him the task of judging pace. 

As Tolliver went into the stall, the Easterner 
caught his hand and shook it. “Good luck, boy,” 
he said heartily, and Tolliver felt as though a fresh 
strength had passed through his grasped hand and 
into his heart. 

He stood for a moment at the colt’s head. He 
noted that again the two-year-old was trembling as 
with an ague and that his nostrils stood wide and 



1 3 2 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


feverishly red. He stroked the nose and the satin 
neck. He whispered something into the twitching 
ears—and they quieted into an alert composure. 

Then the bugle spoke again and a voice sounded 
out, “Boys up!” 

Tolliver turned his face from the back of the 
stall to the front and then abruptly, as he was about 
to give his foot to Colonel Parrish for mounting, 
he stood stock still and a maddened blaze spurted 
in his eyes. 

There against the side post of the stall stood an 
unexpected figure and above its stocky shoulders a 
face smiled blandly. 

Tolliver knew that figure, which to the others 
was only that of a countryman come to town for 
the races. The man wore dark store clothes and 
a broad-brimmed black hat. He was shaven to the 
blood, but between the neck band of his white shirt 
and its collar, there was no blending of a necktie.. 

Tolliver thought for an instant that his imagina¬ 
tion had materialized before his eyes the person of 
Tom Malone, and then he knew that this was no 
trick of fancy but the substantial attestation of 
fact. 

“Howdy, Tolly,” the man without a necktie 
greeted him affably. “Air ye astonished ter see me 
here?” 

Sudden and volcanic passions of fury leaped in 
the boy and his answer was a strange one. 


THE ROGUE’S BADQE 133 

“Ye hain’t got no necktie on,” he spat out. “Ye 
had ought ter hey one—made of hemp.” 

Only the bystanders that pressed immediately 
about the stall caught the words, but Tom Malone 
caught both their sound and their meaning. He 
smiled suavely and his own voice was low. 

“Mebby herea’ter, sonny, folks’ll git what they 
ought ter have—an’ not only me.” 

It had all taken only a half minute of time, yet in 
its passing Tolliver had been through an earth¬ 
quake. Now he felt himself hoisted to the saddle, 
automatically knotted his reins, thrust home his 
feet, and heard as through confusion the shouted 
command, “Lead out!” 

“Steady, son,” Parrish hurriedly cautioned him. 
“Don’t let anything fluster you. Hold his head up 
and keep him in the clear. Win going away—but 
don’t burn up the track unless you have to.” 

Tolliver could feel his knees shaking in the after- 
math of that surprise and its passion. He knew 
that Fleetwing felt them shaking, too, and just out¬ 
side the gate the colt lunged and began rearing. 

“That’s a bad breaker,” declared a voice that 
carried to the jockey’s ears above the hum of the 
crowd. “He won’t do nothin’ but ball the start up 
an’ delay ’em at the post. To the pound for him!” 

“To hell with Malone,” muttered the boy fiercely. 
“Thar’s time enough fer him ter hang herea’ter. 
This is a hoss-race,” and he settled down over his 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


134 

high knees, took the knotted reins in one hand and 
let the other slide caressingly along the brown neck. 
“Steady thar boy,” he exhorted reassuringly, “you 
an’ me hain’t got no call ter git tetchious. This 
hyar race is our meat!” 


CHAPTER XI 


G RADUALLY, under the solacing touch on 
his neck, the curvetting two-year-old 
smoothed out of his fractiousness. His 
crab-like side-stepping settled into the calm swing of 
a rocking-horse and when he came, in the procession, 
under the judicial eyes of the kiosk—eyes that re¬ 
membered him unfavourably from last Monday’s 
fiasco—he was a picture animal, superb of propor¬ 
tion and velvet-smooth of temper, with the man¬ 
ners of a veteran and every inch the thoroughbred. 

Suddenly all the world except that bounded by 
the rails and furlong poles had melted from the 
jockey’s mind, and all his own nervousness was 
sloughed off, just as Fleetwing’s blanket had been 
left behind. 

“Thet startin’ jedge won’t hev no monstrous 
great likin’ fer us, boy,” he said, talking low to his 
mount. “He won’t disremember what a cuss-fight 
ye give ’em las’ Monday, I reckon. He won’t take 
no master pains ter git ye off purty—an’ yore place 
hain’t so bodaciously good nohow—out thar on ther 
outside.” 

The little procession of youngsters with their 
135 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


136 

monkey-like riders in gay silks cantered the three 
and a half furlongs to the place where the starting 
staff awaited them-for the Bashford Manor is run 
at four and a half furlongs and the field is sent 
away from the backstretch. 

Then the jockeying began and, as before, two or 
three youngsters were whirling and kicking, to the 
hot exasperation of the starter and his aides. 

To-day, Fleetwing was not one of these incor- 
rigibles. Under that hand that caressed his neck, 
he stood poised, with gathered muscles—but held on 
the extreme outside where he was safe from flying 
hoof-plates. 

As they wheeled and shifted they came for a mo¬ 
ment into line and the rubber tape flew high. 

“Go on,” came the yell as six sets of stirrup 
leathers creaked and six two-year-olds burst for¬ 
ward like shells from a battery. Six jockeys sat 
down and began to ride and on the extreme outside 
went Fleetwing with the cherry-and-white body 
humped almost even with his extended neck. 

“Ye hain’t nuver showed me ther full of what ye 
kin do,” yelled the boy wildly, “show me now!” 

He must get to the lead, free of interference, and 
slip in on the rail, and to do that he must outfoot 
the quick breakers far enough to cross their front, at 
a winged speed that would take the starch out of 
anything but a stayer. 

There was a din in Tolliver’s ears like the roar of 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


U37 

a hurricane. Leather was groaning, silks whipping, 
hooves drumming and a swelter of fierce, straining 
effort overhung the close-bunched field. The hill- 
boy seemed riding in the centre of a tornado, and his 
eye was gauging that tricky angle that he must make 
across the squadron front. 

If he cut in too close, even though he won, his 
mount would be disqualified for crowding and he 
himself would be “set down” in suspension during 
the pleasure of the stewards. But he did not cut 
in too close: only close enough, to a hair’s breadth. 
His mind functioned in that confusion as accurately 
as a clock. He figured it mathematically, exactly, 
and with perfect skill. He opened his lead on the 
outside and bored evenly in, and as the steaming 
mass of horseflesh bunched, struggling for positions, 
at the far turn he found himself on the rail with 
only a black nose at his knee and the exhortations 
of a green-capped boy in his ears. Then, with the 
race hardly half run, Colonel Parrish took his binoc¬ 
ulars from his eyes and put them calmly away in 
their case. “Gentlemen,” he said to two compan¬ 
ions with whom he had made private bets, “you 
pay me.” 

Tolliver was sitting stock still with his reins still 
wrapped about his knuckles. He heard the bat fall 
on the black and under that summons, the black nose 
crept even with the brown. The black was crowd¬ 
ing him unpleasantly close to the unyielding fence 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


138 

and once Tolliver’s near knee scraped the white¬ 
wash. But the black was labouring now, gamely 
and magnificently under steel and rawhide which 
fell at each stride, and the rest of the field was 
stringing into a wake of broken-hearted exhaustion. 

Tolliver bent a shade lower over the brown neck. 
His hands let slip the wraps and took hold of the 
head. “Romp home son,” he begged. “Romp 
home, but not too fast. . . . Don’t show ’em 

all ye’ve got jest yit. Ye don’t haf ter!” 

Fleetwing shot forward until the black nose 
panted at his rump, until daylight showed between, 
until he was galloping without company two lengths 
ahead, and still with a firm restraint on his bit. 

A sixteenth of a mile beyond the stand Tolliver 
had pulled him down to a walk. “We could hev 
hung up a new record ef we’d been minded ter,” he 
told himself exultantly, “but they cautioned us not 
ter burn up ther track.” 

Slowly he rode back and, as he came, the scores 
of thousands were standing. Though most of them 
had lost on that race, their cheering swept like artil¬ 
lery thunder up into the blue overhead, and rever¬ 
berated its greeting. 

The boy rode to the kiosk, where already other 
jockeys were unsaddling, and there—emptily wait¬ 
ing for him who had the sole privilege of entering 
it, was the half circle bounded by white—the victor’s 
reservation. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i39 

Tolliver’s face was stolid again, by a hard muscu¬ 
lar forcing, as he raised his whiphand in salute, and 
then when it had been answered by a nod he slid to 
the ground and began unsaddling. It was his first 
victory and as he stood on the scales with his gear, 
his knees went suddenly weak. When he walked 
back to the paddock after the blanketed horses he 
realized that this colt had come into his own. As 
yet he was not thinking of himself. 

It was as though through a dream that he 
watched the running of the Derby itself. 

Next year Fleetwing would be starting in that; 
in the Preakness; in the Withers, in the Belmont— 
in all that succession of major handicaps where 
three-year-old preeminence is decided—and perhaps 
he would be riding. 

“Snip” Button nodded commendingly in the 
jockey room, just as he went out for the great race. 
“You didn’t do so worse, kid,” he deigned to admit. 
“And here’s where we make it two straight for the 
Parrish barn.” 

But they didn’t make it two straight. “Snip” 
rode faultlessly but he couldn’t run the race as well 
as ride it. Under his stretch-drive he brought 
Chimney Swift to the saddle girths of the winner 
and held him there across the wire—but between a 
saddle girth and a nose lay enough difference to be 
measured in many thousands of dollars and much 
glory. It was not Chimney Swift that stood in the 




140 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


chalk circle, while the huge horseshoe of roses was 
hung around his neck and the cameras clicked and 
the stands rocked to their cheering. It was not 
“Snip” Button who was called into the judges’ stand 
to receive from the Governor of the State the great 
trophy-plate or who was carried back to the jockey 
room on the shoulders of howling maniacs. One 
other three-year-old and one other boy had taken 
the measure of Chimney Swift and “Snip” Button. 

* * * 

The master of brush-and-palette or of pen-and- 
page may strive through long years toward a recog¬ 
nition that still flits elusively beyond his grasp. But, 
as the pace of the home stretch is hot and fickle, so 
fame on the race-track comes and goes with the 
bright and sudden flare of the rocket to horses and 
men alike. 

Newswriters set down the record of that Derby 
in columns and dismissed the lesser events of the 
day with paragraphs. 

The Bashford Manor, they said, had been won by 
a good colt that breezed home at a hand gallop and 
with much to spare. He had been ridden by a new 
boy who showed sense enough to sit still and let 
the colt run free of fussing. Only a few shrewd 
observers noted that the race had really been run 
and won in that first sixteenth or that a jockey had 
used a cool and quick judgment in angling across a 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


141 

flying front from outside to inside. These few 
recognized that it was only because he had grasped 
that opportunity and made it his own, that he could 
sit still through the stretch and gallop home as he 
liked. 

But before the Louisville meet ended the Parrish 
string was shipped to Belmont Park, and Tolliver 
found himself transferred to the bewilderingly 
broadened horizon of the metropolis. 

Here he found a racing life and a race-going 
public almost as different from those of Kentucky 
as Louisville had been different from the mountains. 
Here there was no candid mob of speculators swirl¬ 
ing about the “iron-men”; no official recognition of 
track betting at all—and yet through the activities 
of the “oralists” more money seemed to fluctuate 
than on any but feature days back there at the 
Downs. 

Here, too, were a new group of jockeys; held in 
Eastern esteem to be the cream of the profession, 
and here was a spirit of mild contempt for the 
horses and the boys that came out of the West. 

“You’ve got to get wise, kid, that you’ve left the 
tall timbers behind now,” “Snip” Button gave him 
patronizing assurance. “Everything west of the 
Hudson is hick stuff, see? These are regular guys, 
here. A horse may be a world beater back there in 
the sticks, but when he comes here and meets up with 
class it’s the quick fadeout for him, see?” 


142 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


“If I ever gambled on any hoss,” declared Tolli¬ 
ver indignantly, “ye’d hev a chanst ter win a bet 
often me ef ye thinks thar’s any two-year-old round 
hyar kin take Fleetwing’s measure.” 

“Snip” laughed disdainfully. 

“You win three races with him in Louisville, 
didn’t you, kid? Well, you’ve got them three to 
remember like mother remembers baby’s little shoe. 
There wasn’t no two-year-old class to speak of 
there, see? Just good sellin’-plater stuff an’ that’s 
why the Electron trick stood out like a sore thumb. 
Here it’s something else again.” The jockey paused 
and grinned derisively. 

“I get pretty straight info the boss is going to 
take a shot at the Juvenile with the brown baby and 
you’re going to be in the pilot house. You’ll get an 
eyeful then kid, take it from me—and a bellyful, 
too.” 

“All I asks is ter be thar when they starts,” came 
the grim retort. “Fleetwing’ll see ter ther bal¬ 
ance.” 

He found echoed in the racing columns of the 
papers that same Eastern self-sufficiency; that same 
casual patronage for the West, and one day he com¬ 
plained hotly of it to Colonel Parrish, who only 
smiled. 

“We bank on that a good bit, son,” said the 
Colonel. “New York doesn’t admit that anything 
good can come from any other place. This town 


143 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

forgets from year to year that all its champions are 
recruited from abroad.” 

“But they hain’t got no license ter despise Fleet¬ 
wing. Kain’t they read them dope-sheets?” 

Again the turfman smiled. 

“They’ll read them—and heed them—only when 
they bear a local date-line,” he said. “And that’s 
all right, too, since they pay for their egotism.” 

But the Juvenile was not interesting, except in 
advance discussion. An Eastern colt, saddled by a 
famous stable, went to the post an odds-on favourite 
and the time hung out snipped a fraction off the 
track record—but Fleetwing made of the race such 
an easy parade, with the favourite labouring three 
lengths back and the rest nowhere, that the element 
of contest was flattened into void. 

That victory was so easy—to all seeming—and 
called for so little spectacular jockeying, that 
though the metropolitan press acclaimed the son of 
Electron indubitable master of his division, the boy 
who rode him was damned with faint praise as one 
who was called on for little finesse and who under 
such circumstances “proved adequate.” 

Tolliver accepted his implied mediocrity without 
heart-burning. He had never yet brought home 
any victor except the one colt who would run only 
for him, and an exercise boy could have done that 
much. As yet no other stable had come seeking 
second call on his services, and when the brown re- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


144 

mained in his stall Tolliver watched the races from 
the ground. 

Even from the ground there was plenty to see for 
a lad who a year ago had known only the land of 
Do-without, hemmed in by mountain ranges. 

But Chimney Swift, who had finished second in 
the Kentucky Derby, had trained well and would be 
ready for the Suburban, and three days before that 
traditional event, “Snip” Button, riding in other 
than Parrish colours was called into the judges’ 
stand on the claim of a foul made by a boy in a 
blue jacket and cap. 

“He tried to put me over the fence,” panted the 
preferrer of charges. “He bumped me off my 
stride when he wasn’t crowded, an’ when he seen I 
was gettin’ through on the turn he belted my mount 
across the nose with his bat.” 

“It’s a lie,” said “Snip,” coolly meeting the eye of 
his accuser. 

“We will wait,” announced the presiding judge 
crisply, “till the judge of the course gets here.” 
And while they waited the official bell did not ring 
and the result did not go up on the board. Around 
the judges’ stand milled partisans of each contest¬ 
ant, and when the official whose duty had been to 
watch the far turn galloped across the infield on his 
old hunter he spoke briefly and to the point: 

“You made it too raw this time, Button,” came 
the prompt verdict. “We’ve had our eyes on you 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i45 

for some days past. You are on the ground for 
two weeks.” 

So on the evening before the Suburban’s running 
Colonel Parrish called Tolliver into his hotel room 
in town. 

Through the open windows came the grind and 
roar of Sixth Avenue and Broadway, and the Colo¬ 
nel was grimmer of face than the boy had ever 
seen him. 

“I’ve decided to put you up on Chimney Swift 
to-morrow, son,” he said. “I’ve watched you and 
I don’t see why I should go outside my own staff for 
a boy—but this time you won’t have any easy race. 
Sparkplug is five pounds better horse than my colt, 
and Jimmy Earle is the cleverest boy riding in the 
East. If you lose I shan’t be bawling you out— 
but it will be a duel of jockeys and if you can come 
home first—well, you’ll beat a good man.” 

“I aims ter do ther best I knows,” said Tolliver. 

“Listen, son,” went on Parrish earnestly, “you’ve 
been riding a mount that could make suckers of his 
field—once he got away clean. To-morrow you’ll 
have to be using both hands and both feet and your 
head every jump over the mile-and-a-quarter route. 
Chimney Swift’s got to be rated back of the pace to 
the turn home. He can’t lead all the way, and if 
you misjudge the moment to make your move with 
him, he won’t have enough left to come from behind. 
If you save him just long enough, and drive him to 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


146 

the last ounce he’s got in the last stages, and keep 
him clear of pockets and bumping, he may poke his 
nose ahead of Sparkplug on the wire. It’s a large 
order, but if you do that there’ll be as much talk in 
the papers about the rider as the horse.” 

The boy flushed, then turned pale. 

“I aims ter do ther best I knows,” he repeated 
laconically. 

Among the twenty-five thousand race-goers who 
watched that Suburban run there were many conflict¬ 
ing opinions as to just what happened and how it 
came about. Perhaps the story which the sporting 
editor of the Blade wrote that night in the clatter 
of his office near Park Row may be taken as authen¬ 
tic: 

The six originally named went to the post with Sparkplug 
carrying the wise money at the short price of two to five, and 
Charlie Chaplin a strong second choice, but when the race was 
over an unexpected development stood out for contemplation 
and digestion. Sparkplug was a beaten though not a disgraced 
horse and over the horizon of metropolitan racing had risen a 
new and bright star. An unknown jockey had leaped to recog¬ 
nition. For the Suburban of yesterday, though all horse race, 
was still less a horse race than a duel of riding, and in that 
duel, Jimmy Earle, the idol of these parts, went down before 
a lad whose name has not heretofore been widely known. 
This was a lad who talks slowly in a Southern mountain drawl 
but who rides like a streak of galvanic fury, under the control 
of an ice-cold thinking machine. Sparkplug was giving away 
some weight, but even with his impost Sparkplug figured to be 
a good ten pounds the better horse. Until yesterday it would 
have been deemed sacrilege to say it, but to-day it must be 






THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i47 

confessed that T. Cornett looked a little more than ten pounds a 
better boy than Jimmy Earle and that tells the whole sad story. 
. . . Though the start was on the turn, Mars Cassidy got 

the field away as straight as a tight string and Doubt-Not used 
his brilliant early foot to go at once to the front. . . . 


There followed a description of the first stages 
of the race, then this: 


Charlie Chaplin was being rated along in third position as 
they reached the far turn, while Earle with the favourite lay 
back in fourth place, several lengths behind the first division, 
and Chimney Swift, on whom perched the unknown mountain¬ 
eer, was lapped on his saddle skirts. 

Earle moved up slowly while the first formation broke and 
shifted around the^ turn home, and when they straightened for 
the stretch it was seen that the talent’s choice was only gallop¬ 
ing. That surprised no one. What did surprise everyone was 
that, as he moved along toward seemingly easy command the 
bay colt on his saddle skirts stayed there, and when he drew 
away from the rest the bay colt drew away with him. 

Earle rode that finish in his best style, but clever as was his 
work, the new jockey Cornett was undeniably a shade more 
clever. He timed his finish to a nicety. He held Chimney 
Swift together in a superb hand-ride and inch by inch ran 
down the favourite to beat him by a half-head on the wire. 
Had Cornett made a move to go to the bat on the Parrish 
colt he would have tossed off his victory. Had his hand-ride 
been other than flawless, he could not have gotten up. . . . 

The boy was given something of an ovation after the race but 
to all compliments he had one response and he made it some¬ 
what shyly, "Colonel Parrish told me how ter ride him—an’ I 
jest rid him thetaway.” 


CHAPTER XII 


T OLLIVER awoke to find himself not only 
famous in a limited circle but rechristened. 
He might insist on his name as emphatically 
as he liked, but always thereafter the turf knew him 
as “Thetaway” Cornett. 

“What’s so funny erbout sayin’ ‘thetaway’?” the 
boy demanded of Colonel Parrish, “thet they writes 
hit up in newspapers and gives hit ter me fer a nick¬ 
name?” 

The Bluegrass man laughed. “It’s what might 
be termed a marked colloquialism, son,” he an¬ 
swered. “The dialect of the mountains strikes 
these people as quaint enough for comment—and 
you know you do still speak that dialect.” 

“Nobody hain’t nuver tole me thet afore,” ob¬ 
served the boy thoughtfully and his patron reminded 
him: 

“You were never a figure of public interest be¬ 
fore.” 

Tolliver mulled that statement over during a 
long silence and then he announced abruptly: “I 
reckon I’ve got ter mend my speech—an’ my man¬ 
ners.” 


148 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


149 


Parrish smiled and changed the subject. 

“Tolliver,” he said, “I suppose you know that the 
average horseman who had developed a boy like 
you this far would put him under an apprentice 
contract and bind his services for several years.” 

The boy nodded. “I’m ready ter sign up,” he 
said, “ef so-be ye thinks I’m wuth hirin’ thetaway— 
I means that way.” 

But Parrish shook his head. 

“No, son,” he said, “that’s not my idea for you. 
I want you to get ahead as fast as you can—and to 
be studying meanwhile. The object of such con¬ 
tracts is to give the discoverer and developer of a 
promising lad the cream of his exclusive services. 
I’m not going to tie you up. You are to ride as a 
free lance—only giving me first call. I’m men¬ 
tioning that now because after the Suburban you 
won’t have to watch many races from the ground 
unless you want to. They’ll be after you—and I’m 
leaving you free.” 

Tolliver gulped down his emotion of gratitude. 
He sought for and failed to find appropriate phrases 
of acknowledgment and then he said slowly: 

“I’m obleeged ter ye.” 

* * * 

Parrish watched his protege narrowly but with¬ 
out comment. He knew that now came the testing 
time and he was satisfied with his observations. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


150 

This lad, raw from the back-waters of life, was 
being approached by those devious influences which 
are the rank weed-growth of the sporting world. 
Rat-eyed and rat-shrewd characters of the tender¬ 
loin were recognizing him with overtures. 

Young women of a type new to his inexperience 
and rather dazzling to a youth not yet competent 
to appraise their coarseness were willing to associ¬ 
ate with him not as a small statured boy but as a 
man whose name and picture were common in print. 
And Tolliver was changing. His clothes were no 
longer rough and his speech was smoothing—yet so 
far as Parrish could make out his dark eyes re¬ 
mained cool and unbeguiled. 

The summer season about New York drew to its 
end and the horse cars moved on to the cool and 
beautiful environment of Saratoga. In those lists 
that statisticians compiled “Thetaway’s” name 
stood often in the roster of jockeys who brought 
their mounts into the money. A growing coterie 
of gamblers played starters that he took to the 
post. . . . Then with the first turning of the 

leaves and the first colouring of autumn they were 
back once more at Louisville for the fall meeting. 

There as he came out of the jockey room in street 
clothes at the end of one day’s programme, Tolli¬ 
ver found Paul Creighton waiting to shake hands 
and with Creighton were his two daughters, Cary 
and Shirley. 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


151 

The boy grasped the man’s hand, and then as he 
met the friendly eyes of the older girl he flushed, 
and as he encountered those of the younger he stif¬ 
fened. 

He had never confessed it to any one, but he had 
carried for that older girl, several years his senior, 
a boy’s blind worship since she had first smiled on 
him and he had told himself vindictively that he 
hated her sister. Now Shirley was polite, too, and 
congratulated him on his success and, had he not 
altered his speech, he would have explained his own 
attitude by saying that he “had ter make his man¬ 
ners” with her. 

“I wouldn’t know you, Tolliver,” said the young¬ 
er girl. “You don’t look the same or talk the same 
since you became famous.” 

“They made considerable fun of me,” confessed 
the boy. “They sort of shamed me into watching 
my P’s and Q’s but I guess I’m the same under¬ 
neath.” 

“When you get back to Woodford County,” in¬ 
vited Creighton, “come and see us. I used to tell 
you stories of the turf. Now that you’re a man of 
the world, you must tell me a few.” 

“The best of them he won’t tell,” commented 
Colonel Parrish, “because he’s still modest. But 
I’ll fill in the blanks.” 

While he stood there listening to their compli¬ 
ments, with a heightening colour in his tanned 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


152 

cheeks, the boy met the eyes of the older girl and 
from their darkly gracious depths he drew a com¬ 
forting reassurance. It was as if Cary had said, 
“I understand you. It doesn’t matter to me that 
you can’t put into words the things you think.” 

He was feeling, too, that Cary was lovelier than 
his memory had pictured her, and during these 
months of absence that memory had gone with him 
as if it had been a portrait in a locket. When he 
had met the sort of women that a jockey meets in 
the night-life of Broadway, they had seemed sirens 
without lure to him, because between his eyes and 
their faces he had that other image; and in his inar¬ 
ticulate fashion he had called it the image of quality. 
Shirley was “quality,” too, and as he looked at her 
now, he realized that her tomboy beauty had devel¬ 
oped and matured into a thing rather dazzling and 
provocative. Yes, she was quality, too, but quality 
looking half contemptuously down on him. Indeed, 
since he had come back from his first view of the 
Eastern turf, the whole Creighton family stood out 
in a different perspective. They seemed to epito¬ 
mize the cavalier spirit out of which Kentucky had 
spun its web of sportsmanship, and to contrast with 
much of the element that he had encountered about 
the paddocks elsewhere: an element branded by 
greed and palsied by the gambler’s avarice and rat¬ 
like cunning. 

“I’ll be mighty glad to come over when I get 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i 53 

home,” Tolliver found himself saying. “But I ex¬ 
pect I’ll come to hear more things than I’ll have to 
tell.” 

With a sound philosophy the boy was saying in¬ 
side himself: “I’m glad it was Miss Cary I fell to 
worshipping, instead of Miss Shirley . . . be¬ 

cause it don’t belittle my pride as much to say, 
‘She’s older than I am’ as to have to say, ‘She’s bet¬ 
ter than I am—and she knows it.’ ” 

The little group stood in the paddock waiting 
while the crowds drifted toward the gates. In the 
air hung the spicy fragrance of a Kentucky autumn, 
and “Thetaway” Cornett, who had known a child¬ 
hood poisoned by the humiliation of his size and a 
youth shadowed by yearnings for a broader life, 
felt something like a fullness of content. He was no 
longer “poor white trash” among affluent people. 
He stood on his own feet and belonged to this larger 
world. He was a success and life had relish. 

A messenger boy came out of the jockey house 
and someone there pointed toward the group. The 
boy came along shouting out: “Tellygram for Mis¬ 
ter Cornett—tellygram for Mister Cornett!” 

Tolliver did not at first hear him, but Colonel 
Parrish did and beckoned to the message bearer. 
He took the yellow envelope and handed it over. 
“Some Eastern turfman trying to get you for the 
Handicap, son,” he smiled. “But you ride that 
race for me.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i54 

Tolliver laughed and ripped the covering. A 
year ago he would have regarded the receipt of a 
telegram as an astounding event. Now it was all 
in the day’s routine. 

But as he spread and read the paper, his slight fig¬ 
ure grew rigid and his face stiffened into the set 
and stamp of tragedy. He gulped and into his 
eyes, which had first been filmed with dazed amaze¬ 
ment, crept a slow-growing fire that blazed into 
spurts of utter, wordless fury. 

Still he did not speak. He handed the paper to 
Colonel Parrish and stood staring ahead with the 
motionlessness of a bronze figure, and Parrish read 
the message. 

Father shot dead at courthouse door this morning. Come. 

Mother. 

Parrish turned, though the boy seemed to see 
nothing of his immediate surroundings, and whis¬ 
pered to Creighton. “Take the girls away, Paul. 
This is tragedy.” Then he gripped the elbow of 
the lad and began steering him like an automaton 
toward the track gate and across the greensward of 
the infield. 

Almost to the backstretch the boy walked without 
a sound. He seemed to move in the heaviness of 
trance and before the opposite side of the track was 
reached, Parrish halted him, still holding his arm. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


155 

“Son,” he said, and he spoke as if the word and 
the feeling were real and not merely a form of ad¬ 
dress, “there’s still a man that feels himself a father 
to you. ... I have no boy of my own, you 
know. . . 

Tolliver tried to answer but failed, and Parrish 
went on: 

“I’m going to get you to the train in my car. 

Of course you’ll have to cancel your en¬ 
gagements here. I’ll attend to that for you.” 

Slowly “Thetaway” shook his head. His voice 
came hoarse and as if from a distance. 

“I’m goin’ to the buryin’ now,” he said, “but I’ll 
be back to ride right soon.” 

“Back to ride! My God, boy, your father lies 
dead—murdered.” 

The cloak of apathy fell from the boy’s shoulders 
and a lightning bolt seemed to shoot through his 
body. His eyes blazed afresh. 

“Thet’s why I’m cornin’ back,” he burst out pas¬ 
sionately. “He lays dead—murdered up thar whar 
he made his fight. I told you once that I didn’t 
care about money. . . . Now I need money 

. heaps of money. . . . Now I’m not 

riding just to win races. Henceforth I’m workin’ 
to hang a man . . . that it comes high to hang 

. . . an’ I reckon I’ll ride like I never rode 

afore.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


156 

“There is a night train to Hixon Town from 
Lexington but no connection out of Louisville, so 
I’ll have to put you into Lexington by motor,” de¬ 
clared Parrish crisply, when they had driven to the 
hotel. “It’s ninety miles, but the right driver can 
do it.” 

The Colonel could not go himself, but he left 
Tolliver in his room under pledge to remain there 
quietly while he effected the arrangements, and the 
boy, whose thoughts were groping along grim and 
dark corridors, sat unmoving in the chair where he 
had been left. Soon enough his life would break 
to the speed of a more violent activity, but just now 
he was thinking and some mentor in his conscious¬ 
ness kept warning him, “Don’t let your feelings 
bolt—because if you start wild you’ll run mad.” 

“It would be plum easy,” he told himself, “to 
meet Malone and shoot this business out on sight 
. . . in a hand-to-hand fray. ... It would 

be easier still to hire him kilt. . . . But my pap 

died to end that sort of doings. I reckon he 
couldn’t skeercely rest quiet in his grave if his own 
boy turned back-slider from his teachin’s. I reckon 
if his gospel was good enough to him to die for, it’s 
good enough for me to foller.” 

It was that conviction which forced him into an 
immobile quiet now when every vein and artery 
pounded and every thought blistered him with an 
overpowering thirst for speedy and personal re- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


157 

prisal. That thirst was as hot and dry, in his 
heart, as the craving of an alcoholic fighting his 
appetite. It had been bred through generations of 
undeviating and clannish blood; it struck back to a 
spirit which held the delegation of such accountings 
to juries as a cowardly and ineffectual makeshift. 
Against it warred the conviction of a single genera¬ 
tion; that of the man who had failed and fallen 
dead for it. It was the bequest of a father set 
against the cumulative heritage from a long line of 
grandsires—that and his own sure belief that his 
father had been right. 

If the son lost the fight that was waging in his 
own bosom now, he was lost to his father’s creed: 
he had reverted to the code which his father repudi¬ 
ated as savagery. Besides that, the quick and mer¬ 
ciful end of the bullet’s shock was too clean a finish 
for Malone. Brave men, like his father, went that 
way to death. For Malone there must be the hu¬ 
miliation of the hangman’s rope and the black cap; 
of the days of shameful contemplation and fore¬ 
taste ; of the mortifying walk to the scaffold under 
the eyes of witnesses no longer held in bondage. 
Yet all that seemed a remote and sluggish method 
when his instincts cried out that it was his own right 
and duty to punish with his own hand and at 
once. 

The boy’s face was chalk white with his large 
eyes burning in its pallor, and his clenched fingers 


158 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

bit into the palms of his hands and stained them— 
yet he sat still. 

“More races are won at the start than in the 
stretch,” he kept reiterating to himself. “Right 
now I’m seekin’ to hold a runaway, an’ hell’s bilin’ 
inside me—but I know what he’d bid me do.” In 
the bag he had hastily packed there was an auto¬ 
matic pistol, and slowly Tolliver took it out and 
looked at it, turning it in his hand. Then with a 
stiffly set jaw he shook his head and thrust the thing 
aside. To be armed would be to traffic with temp¬ 
tation—and if he saw Malone’s face at the station 
when he left the train, a moment of passion and 
madness might blast into debris hours of hard- 
fought resolve. 

Parrish came into the room and nodded, and Tol¬ 
liver rose and followed him. The Colonel knew 
that “Thetaway” Cornett could not make his way 
through the hotel lobby without being stopped by 
some enthusiastic member of the racing public for 
whom he was a well-known actor. So he had ar¬ 
ranged an exit through a service door on to the side 
street where a car stood parked at the curb. 

So oppressively vivid in the boy’s mind was the 
picture of that house up there in the mountains 
where a body lay quiet, so remote and lax was his 
grasp on present things, that when he thought back 
on that departure from the Louisville hotel, he 
could never recapture its details. He did not 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


159 

notice who was in the car, but flinging his bag into 
the tonneau, he took his own place in the front seat 
and remained staring ahead as unseeingly as if the 
windshield had been opaque. 

It was only when the machine had swung onto the 
Shelbyville pike and left the city limits behind that 
he realized it was plunging ahead at a speed which 
defied every traffic restriction, and that its driver 
was handling it as he himself might have handled a 
mount on the track; rating it with a realization of a 
ninety-mile stretch and time enough to do it only by 
scorching the road. 

Then slowly, as if waking by degrees from a stu- 
pefication, “Thetaway” turned his head—and saw 
that the face which held its eyes to the front and the 
small hands that gripped the wheel were those of 
Shirley Creighton. 

She was not looking at him and her attention was 
all for the road. A limousine swung out between 
the stone gateposts of a country place, making a 
wide turn and from the back seat came the startled 
shout of Paul Creighton, “Careful, girl!” But 
Shirley swung her wheel, whipped round the obsta¬ 
cle and was on the straight again with the needle of 
the speedometer standing at forty-five. 

They had covered some ten miles before Tolliver 
spoke: 

“I didn’t know you were aimin’ to drive me,” he 
said. “You’re takin’ a heap of trouble for me.” 


i6o 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


The girl did not turn her head even then. Her 
profile was a clear-cut cameo of determination and 
her curling hair, with glints of bronze in its brown, 
whipped in the wind of the speed. 

“That’s all right,” she said briefly. “I can get 
more speed out of this old boat than Father.” After 
a minute she added quietly, “Nothing is trouble 
when a friend’s in distress.” 

“Thank you,” said the boy. “I’m in right sore 
distress—and from now on, God knows I’m a 
friend.” 



CHAPTER XIII 


I T WAS between midnight and dawn when Tol¬ 
liver swung himself down from the platform 
of the rickety local at Hixon Town, and seem¬ 
ingly both station and street were deserted save 
where the yellow glimmer of the signal-room win¬ 
dow told of an operator still on duty. But as the 
boy hastened at a stride that was almost a run along 
the empty way, a noiseless figure detached itself 
from the shadow, back of the building, and went to 
report to Tom Malone that “Little Tolliver” had 
come back. 

The prosecutor’s house stood on the skirts of the 
town, and the boy climbed to it along a black and 
steep path, but its window, too, sent out a feeble 
light across the murk of the sleeping village and as 
the gate creaked, Tolliver raised a voice which 
seemed to thunder through the stillness: 

“It’s me, Ma, it’s Tolly—an’ I’m cornin’ in.” 

Cal Deering, the uncle who had come to the race¬ 
track in Louisville, swung the door cautiously for 
the boy and latched it again after he had entered. 
Suddenly, in the dejected glow of a single lamp, a 


162 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


dozen forgotten details of that “settin’-room” 
leaped up before the boy’s eyes, proclaiming them¬ 
selves as squalid. The narrowness and the sordid¬ 
ness of this whole rude land and its life smote him 
like a stifling smell—and yet this house had been 
that of a man lonely in his progressive spirit, of a 
man who had laid down his life for change and ad¬ 
vancement 

Now on a sofa—whose springs were broken—a 
white sheet was heaped with a deadly stillness over 
something that had been that man. 

Just inside the threshold the boy halted as though 
he had been slugged on the temple and stunned. 
There was nothing to surprise him here, nothing 
for which he had not come prepared, yet as his eyes 
confirmed the thing which he had, until this moment, 
known only through the written word, it was, some¬ 
how, as though it all engulfed him anew. He paused 
and groped with his hands, as if he had become 
blind, and for that moment he was blind; clouded 
of vision with the red mists of fury and outrage that 
swam before his pupils. 

His mother sat in a rocking chair by the sofa 
where lay her dead. 

She sat leaning forward with her ash-gray face 
staring and she looked almost as though she, too, 
were lifeless, in the stillness of her misery. She 
did not rise to greet her son. She did not even 
look around. She did not know he was there, and 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


163 

the boy started as at some inappropriate raucous¬ 
ness of sound, when the nasal voice of Cal Deering 
broke the hushed tenseness: 

“Sally, hyar’s leetle Tolly. He’s done come.” 

Still the woman did not move and Cal went over 
and thrust out his hand to rouse her by his touch, 
but Tolliver jumped forward and caught his shoul¬ 
der violently, as though his interference were a sac¬ 
rilege. 

“Don’t tech her,” he whispered in a still fury. 
“I’ll tell her myself.” 

The man fell sullenly back and the boy knelt at 
his mother’s side and laid his arm across her shoul¬ 
ders. 

Then she slowly turned her face and looked at 
him. He saw that her eyes were dry and lusterless 
as with a sort of nod she reached over and folded 
down the sheet from the covered face, exposing its 
still features and the dark “Sunday suit” and fresh 
linen in which the body had been clothed for burial. 

“They got him,” came the slow, laconic words in 
a dead and unnatural voice. “Thar he lays, Tolly.” 

“Ma,” burst out the boy suddenly, “ain’t ye cried 
none?” and the woman shook her head. 

“Ye’ve got ter cry,” he urged desperately, “ye’ve 
got ter cry or hit’ll kill ye.” 

“Hit’s done come ter pass jest like I foretold hit 
would,” volunteered Cal Deering as he stood look¬ 
ing morosely down from the foot of the couch. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


164 

“He couldn’t be dissuaded—an’ now he’s done paid 
fer his folly.” 

Tolliver came up from his knees and wheeled on 
the speaker. 

“Shet up!” he commanded in a gasping voice. 
“It’s better to die like he did than to live craven— 
like you.” 

“I hain’t faultin’ him fer fightin’ Malone,” went 
on Cal stubbornly, and it was plain that to his un¬ 
derstanding had penetrated nothing of the true issue 
which had cost this life. “Hit’s jest because he 
went erbout hit in sich a chuckle-headed fashion. 
Now ef he’d got hisself a forty-some-odd an’ shot a 
mess of dog-meat offen Malone’s bones-” 

This time the boy’s voice was dangerously still 
and warning: 

“I’ve done told ye to shet up, ain’t I?” 

It may have been the sound of the voices raised in 
altercation that brought the woman out of her 
trance-like apathy. From her lips ran a long and 
strangling moan, then she bowed her head and her 
delayed tears came flooding. 

After that rocking spasm of loosened grief, the 
widow straightened a little in her chair and told the 
story. It came with the jerk and fitfulness of 
broken sentences. 

“Yore pap knowed he couldn’t go on livin’ hyar,” 
she said, “an’ when he finally come ter see I couldn’t 
endure hit no longer he consented ter move down ter 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


165 

ther lowlands. . . . He’d done been seekin’ 

ter git some new law passed ... an’ hit 
looked like he mout succeed . . . ef he lived 

long enough.” She broke off and at length Tolliver 
prompted her gently. 

“He had decided to move? Where was he go¬ 
ing?” 

“Lexin’ton,” she answered. “He’d done tuck a 
house down thar, an’ we’d done packed up . . . 

we was goin’ down on ther cars . . . terday. 

“To-day!” exclaimed the boy. “Do you mean 
that in a few hours more he’d have been safe?” 

His mother inclined her head. 

“He knowed thet every time he sot his foot 
abroad in town he tuck a chanst of dyin’ 
an’ every time he went ter ther co’t-house I walked 
betwixt him an’ t’other side of ther street . 
whar Tom Malone’s store sets.” 

She paused and again the prolonged moan came 
from her lips. 

“But I’d done gone ter ther deepo’ ter buy tick¬ 
ets . . an’ whilst I was away, he recollected 

some matter he’d done overlooked . . . 

down thar at ther co’t-house . . . so he went 

thar by hisself—jest oncet.” 

Tolliver drew a long, rasping breath: “Yes,” 
he urged, “yes?” 

“He’d done finished his matter up—whatever hit 


i66 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


was . . . an’ he war cornin’ outen the do’. 

. Then ther rifle-gun cracked ... hit 
jest shot one shoot. . . . Thet’s all.” 

“Where did that shot come from?” demanded 
the boy. 

“Thar war folks standin’ all roun’,” answered the 
widow with a bleak irony of tone, “but they all nor¬ 
ates thet they couldn’t make out ther which ner 
whether of hit.” 

“I reckon I come nigh enough knowing,” de¬ 
clared Tolliver grimly. 

“An’ now,” suggested Cal, “I reckon mebby ye 
sees ther folly of fightin’ devils with law books, 
don’t ye, Tolly?” 

The boy kept his back turned on his garrulous 
kinsman and spoke again to his mother. 

“Ma,” he said, “ye’ve heard what your brother 
counsels and you know what he fought for and died 
for . . .” his hand went tremblingly out toward 

the sheeted body. “What do you say? If I kill 
Tom Malone I won’t make any great mistake as to 
the man that’s responsible . . . but unless I 

hang him, I turn my back on my father’s teachings 
for all time. What do you say?” 

The woman sat staring at the quiet face on the 
pillow. 

Suddenly she came to her feet and stood swaying 
with her thin hands clenched into fists, against her 
shrunken breasts. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


167 

“I’m a mountain woman, Tolly,” she declared. 
“My folks wouldn’t see but jest one thing to do 
. . . an’ they’d do hit,” she turned her eyes 

again to the shape under the sheet. “But still,” 
she went on, “ef he could hev ther breath of life 
back jest long ernough ter speak some siv’ral 
words ... I knows full well what he’d say 
an’ what he’d say air both text an’ gospel 
ter me, Tolly.” 

The boy’s eyes held those of his mother as he put 
his question insistently: 

“What would he say, Ma?” 

“He’d say thet ther curse of feud killin’s must 
go. He’d say thet so long es ther doctrine of pun- 
ishin’ one crime with another crime went on thar 
couldn’t be no betterment. He’d say ef we didn’t 
foller his teachin’s, he’d lived an’ died in vain. 
. . . He said thet mighty nigh with his last 

breath ... an’ ef he could speak from his 
grave, he’d say hit over ergin.” 

“An’ is that the law you want me to follow?” 

The woman covered her face with her hands. 
Conflict of spirit pulled her opposite ways as a tug- 
of-war strains at a rope. 

“Yes . . . because hit’s his will.” Suddenly 

the hands came down and the eyes that had seemed 
so dead flashed into volcanic frenzy. “An’ yit,” she 
panted, “ef I follered my own heart an’ cravin’, I’d. 
bid ye not nuver ter lay down ter rest . . . tell 


168 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


Tom Malone stretched dead ... an’ ef ye 

failed me . . . I’d tek up a gun myself-” 

She broke off abruptly and turned her back. After 
a moment she said in an altered and fainter voice: 
“But I knows thet’s sinful talk an’ I’m his widder. 

. He’d censure me fer sich like talk es thet.” 

“Mebby,” suggested Cal morosely, “wimmen folks 
an’ puny boys kin pleasure themselves turnin’ t’other 
cheek. Es fer me I’m afeared I may come next 

. . an’ I’m studyin’ erbout sottlin’ this score 

fer myself afore hit’s too tardy.” 

Tolliver turned and walked over till he stood 
close, facing his uncle. 

“Cal,” he said contemptuously, “Malone kills 
men he’s afraid of. He’s not afraid of you. He 
won’t fret himself about you but I will!” The 
voice shot suddenly up into gusty anger. 

“My father has given his life for his gospel. 
I’m goin’ to preach it and enforce it! His life 
sha’n’t be wasted. His death sha’n’t go for naught. 
I’m goin’ to hang Malone—and kinsman or not—if 
you lift your hand in assassination, so help me God 
A’mighty, I’m goin’ to hang you too.” 

* * * 

The dreary funeral had ended—dreary, that is, 
in all but the flaming magnificence of the woods. 
They burned along the mountain walls in crimson 
and yellow and burgundy under the touch of an 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 169 

early frost. It was as though the hills had gar¬ 
landed themselves in splendid tribute to a man who 
had sought to lift their curse. Along the distances 
the peaks were wreathed in an ashen violet, as if 
funeral pyres sent up memorial smoke from every 
slope and summit. Yet at the grave, even the 
preacher had seemed to fear lest, in too eulogistic 
a pronouncement for the dead, he might offend the 
living, and now Tolliver Cornett was taking his 
mother to the train, to go away and make her 
new home among strangers in Lexington. The 
house from which the coffin had been borne was 
locked and its chimney smokeless. 

At the railroad station that afternoon Tom 
Malone stood idly talking to fellow townsmen, and 
as the family of his accuser came along the cinder 
platform, he drew back with the air of deference 
for their grief. His manner seemed to say, “I 
offer no condolences because it would sound hypo¬ 
critical . . . but I sympathize.” 

Tolliver saw him and once again spots of red 
swam giddily before his eyes, but he marched by as 
though the other man had been transparent. 

When he had helped his mother into the day 
coach, though, and stored her diversified bundles 
about her, he came out again, and while the by¬ 
standers drew back in excited surprise, he walked 
over to the man to whose punishment he had dedi¬ 
cated his life. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


170 

As he went he carried his hands wide of his body, 
in assurance that he contemplated no swift draw 
from a hidden holster, and despite his maddened 
fury of a few minutes back, he spoke now with a 
steady and controlled voice. 

“Tom Malone,” he said, “I want to have speech 
with you.” 

Malone stood with folded arms. He knew that 
at his back were two henchmen who were ready and 
quick on the draw, if need for protection arose. He 
himself could afford the posture of cool indifference. 

“Right readily, son,” he replied. “An’ afore ye 
speak, I want to say that when you start in to hunt 
down your pap’s murderer, I stand full ready an’ 
willin’ to aid ye.” 

“If you were,” answered the boy tartly, “you 
wouldn’t have to hunt far. I’m goin’ away now, be¬ 
cause what I’ve got to do takes money . . . I’m 
goin’ away to earn it . but I’m cornin’ 

back . . . and when I come back . 

you’re goin’ to hang.” 

The men at the back let their right hands slide 
under their arm-pits, but Malone smiled and they 
did not yet withdraw them. 

“You’re excited, son,” said the local baron, “an’ 
a man kain’t handily blame ye. I’ve heard talk 
like yours before and I’ll give ye an answer outen 
the Good Book ... I counsels ye to tarry 
at Jericho till yore beard grows . . . then 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


171 

when ye come back, God willin’, I’ll still be here 
where I belongs.” 

The boy turned and walked to the train. He did 
not look over his shoulder, as he went, and because 
the place was too public for discreet murder, he 
went unmolested. 


CHAPTER XIV 


T HE “Widder Cornett” huddled on the 
threadbare and cinder-gritted plush of her 
seat in the day coach and scarcely once did 
her eyes turn to the window that framed a receding 
panorama of the mountain world—the only world 
she knew and the world she was leaving. 

She gazed in silence and fixedly at the case which 
contained a brightly painted axe for use in case of 
wreck or fire, and this was the only thing she saw, 
if she saw anything. 

Tolliver was realizing as he sat there at her side 
a thing that had never demanded a place in his 
thoughts before—the austere loneliness of life 
which his father must have known. His father 
must have had largeness of thought and ideals that 
cried out for spaciousness of environment and the 
shoulder-touch of fellow thinkers. He had had 
none of these things. When the elder Cornett had 
contemplated the need of moving to the lowlands, 
with what a tangle of emotions must he have 
fronted his future! He had spoken of himself as 
a crude country lawyer going to compete with cul- 
172 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i 73 

tivated practitioners. But now Tolliver could see 
that the man himself could soon have adapted him¬ 
self to new surroundings, because though the rough 
bark was on him, the trunk and branch and leafage 
of his nature were sound and strong and spreading. 
Tolliver would have cut out his tongue rather than 
put into words the thought that stung its way into 
his realization now. It was his mother who could 
not have changed, and though no mountaineer would 
admit shame for his own, his father must have 
fretted in sure foresight over the mortification 
which would be inevitable for this woman down 
there among alien sisters. In the fundamentals of 
life she had always been a rock of strength and sup¬ 
port, but in every external she was as unpolished as 
native rock and as unamenable to change. 

He himself must have seemed to his father an 
unlicked cub, and for all his intense family devo¬ 
tion that father had lived mentally uncompanioned. 
Now there lay ahead of young Tolliver, himself, at 
eighteen, the task of equipping himself to carry on 
a fight that the other had laid down. It was a 
fight that meant changing the written law of his 
state and bringing to justice men who lay behind 
breastworks of organized power and money- 
strength. Such warfare called for the heavy artil¬ 
lery of funds. 

It was a large order, and the boy nodded grimly 
in acceptance of its obligation. “It’ll take a bit of 


i 7 4 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

ridin’—and studyin’,” he told himself, “but it’s got 
to be done.” 

He reflected, too, on the words he had spoken to 
Malone. That accosting of his enemy had been a 
silly thing and yet it was a gesture of defiance, and 
the serving of a notice, which his own self-respect 
had made imperative. It would be three years be¬ 
fore he came of age—a long time for him to wait 
but a short time for Malone to finish life and free¬ 
dom in, and a short time too for him to do the things 
that stretched before him for accomplishment. 
Malone might, except for that challenge, have thrust 
him out of mind as an undersized boy whose family 
had been “run out of the mountains.” Now he 
would make no such mistake. He would know that 
a boy who had walked up to him where he stood, 
flanked by his gunmen, could not be contemptuously 
dismissed. Hereafter Tolliver could go to his boy¬ 
hood home only as a marked man. In that respect 
at Least he had placed himself squarely in his father’s 
stead, and he knew it but he had not found it en¬ 
durable to leave in the dumbness of a terrorized 
refugee. 

The boy was gazing outward through the win¬ 
dow at the flaming forests and inward at the deso¬ 
lateness of his realization. 

“It’s three years before I can be admitted to the 
Bar,” he told himself, “but right now I must see that 
the newspapers don’t let the people forget this 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i 75 

murder—or why it came to pass. . . . Right 

now I must get Judge Softridge to work for that 
new law, while the remembrance is fresh 
and in those three years I must make all the money 
a jock can make . . . I’ve got to ride like no 

boy ever rode before. . . . If I can’t be a full- 

sized man, I’ve need to make it pay to be a runt.” 

* * * 

It was with an anxious face that Colonel Parrish 
took the booted foot of his jockey in his hand to 
give him a leg-up for the Autumn Handicap. It 
would be a gruelling race, calling for all the support 
that a boy could give a horse, and out of the eyes of 
the lad who had come home from the hills, youthful¬ 
ness seemed to have been winter-killed. It was a 
sombre face, full of age-old solemnity, and around 
the tight corners of the lips hovered a grimness that 
ought to belong only to disillusioned age. 

But the racing public did not see enough of 
“Thetaway” at close range to speculate upon any 
change in him, and the racing public was ready to 
give him assurance of their partisan support. Men 
who usually read only the sporting columns had fol¬ 
lowed the story of that backwoods tragedy in the 
news pages, and this was the favourite jockey’s first 
public appearance since he had doffed silks and tack 
to go home and bury his dead. 

Colonel Parrish need not have worried. The 
true actor may come fresh from the frost bite of 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


176 

tragedy but, once he has crossed the invisible line 
that separates the darkened wings from the foot¬ 
lights, he passes into the world of his art and of 
his stage character. The shadow waits for him but 
does not follow him into the calcium—and once 
Tolliver gathered his reins and thrust home his feet 
into the irons, he became the Cornett of the track, 
and left behind him in the paddock all but the psy¬ 
chology of the thunder through the dust of back- 
stretch, turn, and finish. 

This was the mountain boy’s idea of loyalty. 
Some bereaved people say it with flowers and tears. 
Tolliver meant to say it with success and a venge¬ 
ance nourished on the iron of success. 

When his mount appeared on the track it was the 
signal for an ovation, because there is nowhere a 
more sentimental world than the sporting world, 
and the stands stood up, and the lawns leaned for¬ 
ward, and into the jockey’s ears poured tidal waves 
of exhortation, encouragement, and tribute. 

“Attaboy, ‘Thetaway’! . . . We’re ridin’ with 
you, ‘Thetaway’! . . . It’s ‘Thetaway’ all the 

way, in a walk! . . . You’re home already, boy!” 

“Thetaway” did not smile or look around. On 
the track an idol does not “take his call,” but he 
rode for them and won for them and he did it in a 
finish of such hair-raising excitement that it looked 
like a dead-heat to the stands, and required the 
more absolute viewpoint of the judges to split apart 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


177 

the winner and the place horse. With the same 
mount an indifferent jockey might have been as good 
as third in that finish where four starters could have 
been covered at the wire with a single blanket. 

After getaway day at Louisville the Parrish 
horses and the Parrish staff went back to the Wood¬ 
ford County farm. For them the racing season 
was over until next spring, when the Electron colt 
would come back in three-year-old form, which is 
the high noon of a thoroughbred’s day. Lesser 
stables, where class was not so highly held or tra¬ 
dition so esteemed, would race on through the winter 
on the Mexican border, and in Havana. Some 
handicap horses would make those pilgrimages too 
—but it was Parrish’s view that those meets catered 
to the confirmed habitue who must have horse races 
of any sort; the habitue to whom the turf is a gam¬ 
bling enterprise as unequivocally as Monte Carlo 
or the pavilions along the Promenade des Anglais 
at Nice. 

Colonel Parrish himself left them alone. He 
could afford to winter his stock and wait for the 
spring, and for a while “Thetaway” Cornett, too, 
went to the farm where his mother, who had given 
up the house in Lexington, was making her home 
with her brother Fletch, and slowly going the way 
of heartbreak and melancholia. 

That cabin-like place had transplanted in the 
Bluegrass the sordidness and squalor of mountain 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


178 

life, but had succeeded in bringing with it none of 
the alleviating mountain grandeur. Tolliver might 
have sunk into the abyss of despair within those 
dusty walls where yellowed news sheets served in 
the stead of wall paper, and where against rough 
ceilings hung a reek of wood smoke and pipe smoke. 
Here, grime and sinister memories seemed to lurk 
in the shadows, as spiders do in unclean webs, and 
to creep out from them to encroach on the flare and 
flicker of fireplace and hearth. 

The boy, who had come so short a while ago from 
the clean beauty of Saratoga, sought at first to 
amend these hard surfaces of life and soften their 
rasping angles for his mother; but his mother and 
his kinsman saw in his effort only the self-accorded 
superiority which he, himself, had fancied in the 
mischief-glinting eyes of Shirley Creighton. 

“All my life,” whimpered the widow desolately 
and bleakly, “I’ve done been a mounting woman, 
an’ now all that’s dear ter me lays buried in ther 
hills. Hit’s too tardy fer me ter make myself over 
into a fine lady because my boy’s tuck on new¬ 
fangled notions.” 

Tolliver groaned, and gave up his trial at reform¬ 
ing and bettering the soul imprisonment to which his 
mother had actually grown attached and into which 
the roots of her life struck down. 

He gave up his effort and within the walls that 
housed her, like an actor cast in an uncongenial 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


179 

role, he even sought to be a mountaineer in conduct, 
shunning as an offense the very attainments he had 
striven to acquire—the deportment and the manners 
that passed without comment and without ridicule 
among gentlefolk. 

He conscientiously played this meagre and unstim¬ 
ulating part at home, and he forced himself to be 
at home enough to hold out to the failing woman a 
constant tender of companionship and sympathy. 
But when it seemed to him that he was being crushed 
under the ponderousness of melancholy, he fled to 
the cheerier houses of Colonel Parrish and Paul 
Creighton. 

“It’s not as if she were living that way because 
she’s bound to it by my father’s memory,” Tolliver 
reflected bitterly. “It was one of the things that 
ate into my father’s soul. It was the thing, as much 
as murder itself, that he was fighting against. It 
was because she couldn’t change that he dreaded 
leaving the mountains and put it off too long—but 
she can’t see that, and if she could it would kill her.” 

Over at Paul Creighton’s, Tolliver did not talk 
much about himself or his exploits on the metropoli¬ 
tan circuit, and though his host always made a pre¬ 
tense of seeking to draw him out, it was usually to 
lapse, after a perfunctory effort as listener, into the 
more congenial role of raconteur. 

Sometimes, Tolliver listened with keen-edged in¬ 
terest and sometimes he sat pretending to give ear, 


180 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

while his face grew stony and dark with his own 
thoughts, and while the firelight flickered on fea¬ 
tures set to memories that were crying out for venge¬ 
ance or playing with the explosive chemicals of 
hate. 

Usually Cary sat apart by the lamp-lighted table 
with a sewing basket, and oftentimes Shirley had 
her chair across the hearthstone from the boy’s ac¬ 
customed seat in the chimney corner. If she 
watched him, it was with an unobtrusiveness that 
went unnoted. But oftentimes, too, a car would 
have whisked Shirley off to a dance before he came 
and would not have brought her back until after he 
had left. At first, on these occasions, he gave a 
sigh of relief, but as the nights went on the sigh be¬ 
came more perfunctory and less genuine, and once as 
he left the place he growled maliciously to himself: 
“Why has she always got to be gadding? Why 
can’t she ever stay home?” 

One evening he had found it particularly hard 
to follow attentively the stories of Paul Creighton 
—stories embellished with an embroidery of self- 
glorification. His inner eye kept dwelling on a 
briar-grown burial ground and on the face of Tom 
Malone which seemed to leer at him. The impulses 
of generations were welling up and clamouring to 
put that face, too, in its grave. 

Although he was not enjoying himself he sat late, 
too depressed to make the effort of departure, and 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 181 

at last the door opened and Shirley came in from 
a dance. At her shoulder followed a youth in 
evening clothes, and as Tolliver rose from his chair, 
his mood flared into an unaccountable anger. This 
youth in white shirt and dinner jacket exercised no 
function in life except to enjoy himself and live with 
an ease for which he had paid nothing in effort. He 
was, nevertheless, good enough to escort Shirley 
Creighton to dances and be the companion of her 
play times. He, himself, was “poor white trash,” 
tolerated and patronized by her. 

Why should he care? What concern was it of 
his ? 

Then he saw again in memory the cameo clarity 
of her profile bending over the wheel of the car 
that was racing with him to his train and his mission. 
He heard again the quiet voice saying: “Nothing is 
trouble when a friend’s in distress.” 

That was it. This girl was a thoroughbred. It 
was not only that she thought herself the salt of the 
earth—but that she knew herself to be. Now, Tol¬ 
liver knew it too, and if he worshipped anything, it 
was the thoroughbred. In Tolliver, changes were 
taking place such as take place in the hills when the 
ice-hardness of winter gives way before the rising 
sap of spring. 

Cary had been kind to him from the first, and be¬ 
cause of that, he had worshipped her—but if she 
had not been kind, he would not in the first place 


182 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


have cared. She had been, to him, a symbol. Shirley 
had galled and tormented him with the mischief 
sting in her eyes—and he had told himself he hated 
her. She had never been a symbol but always an 
actuality. Had he ever hated her at all? Had it 
not been only that he wanted her friendship so much, 
that any condescension, real or fancied, had burned 
and blistered his pride? 

And had not his own grim soberness, resenting her 
laughter, been the same dark characteristic that was 
goading his mother to melancholia? Was not the 
gaiety in her eyes worth more than all the gloom in 
his and in his whole tragedy-worn race? 

The youth in evening dress had said good-night 
and gone out, and stiffly, as though walking in his 
sleep, Tolliver moved forward to follow him. Out¬ 
side the door he halted. It was a night with a 
prickle of frost in the air, but his temples were damp 
with sweat, and he stood there irresolute, hating the 
thought of the house to which he must go. 

Then the door opened at his back and someone 
slipped through it. He wheeled and saw that it 
was Shirley, for though there was no light except 
that which came from the frosty stars, he could 
make out the filmy lightness of her party dress. 

“Just a moment,” she commanded softly, and 
while he stood waiting, she added in a voice that 
was full of sympathy, “What’s the matter? Is 
something new troubling you?” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 183 

Tolliver was surprised, but he only asked: 
“Why?” 

“It was your face,” said the girl slowly. “You 
looked as if something was haunting you. It’s not 
the first time. I’ve seen it before as you sat by the 
fire. Is it anything that I can help?” 

It was hard to answer her. It was hard to an¬ 
swer that question even to himself and his reply 
was a makeshift—scarcely candid. 

“I didn’t know I was wearing a woe-begone face,” 
he told her with a forced laugh. “I guess I was 
thinking about things—back there in the hills.” 

For just a moment her hand rested lightly on his 
arm. 

“Then I can’t help you, can I?” she questioned. 
“No one can help you—but your friends can sympa¬ 
thize—and they do.” 

She turned and disappeared through the door. 


CHAPTER XV 


I T WAS after a call of courtesy upon the widow 
at Fletch’s cottage that Colonel Parrish walked 
one day along the woodland road with Tolliver, 
toward the scarcely better house of Paul Creighton. 

“You’ve got to a point, boy,” said Parrish, “where 
you must look well ahead. You’ve had a success¬ 
ful season but it’s only a start. You must study now 
and study hard—and you must make money. Soft- 
ridge is coming down over the week-end and I mean 
to throw myself with all my energy into this fight 
for the change-of-venue amendment. That’s a 
thing you may safely leave in my hands.” 

“Thank you, sir,” said Tolliver. “It’s a thing 
that’s mighty vital to me.” 

“We’re partners in that,” declared the Colonel. 
“You have a father’s assassination to avenge. I 
have a pride in my state that calls for a house-clean¬ 
ing. Meanwhile you oughtn’t to let up in your 
riding during the winter. You ought to follow the 
game to Tia Juana and Havana.” 

The boy looked up in surprise. 

“I had the notion,” he said, “that you didn’t think 
much of that winter racing.” 

184 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


185 

“Neither do I,” came the quick response. “When 
you go to those places you will run the gauntlet of 
every temptation that can be thrown in a jockey’s 
way, but if you can’t stand up against them, you 
can’t carry through your programme. I believe 
you have a spine—and if I’m wrong I want to 
find it out.” 

“I see,” answered Tolliver soberly. “I want to 
find out, too.” 

“Next spring and summer,” went on Parrish, 
“gives Fleetwing his chance to show whether he’s 
the super horse—or a flash in the pan. You know 
what ‘morning-glories’ are: horses that spin off sen¬ 
sational time in morning-work and then fold up and 
wilt in afternoon races. There are ‘morning-glories’ 
too that are seven-day wonders as two-year-olds and 
that break every promise when they turn three. The 
Electron colt may be one of them.” 

“He won’t be,” declared Tolliver stoutly. “He’s 
a miracle colt.” 

“I hope you’re right. Except for that first start 
when Button let him run away, he’s never lost a race 
—and except for that flivver he’s never been ridden 
except by you.” 

“It’s just happened that way,” came the modest 
response. 

“No,” Parrish smiled that quiet smile of the eyes, 
but he spoke gravely. “I’ve seen to it—and I con¬ 
fess a thing now that I wouldn’t care to advertise 


186 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


generally. I doubt strongly whether Fleetwing 
would run his race for any other rider. He’s a type 
I’ve never encountered before. He’s a one-man 
horse. ... At least I’m afraid he is—so if I 
lose you I may lose his victories—and he may lose 
his career.” 

The boy nodded gravely as he said in sober 
brevity: “I guess you can count on me.” 

At Paul Creighton’s house Colonel Parrish turned 
in and Tolliver went on, but as he followed the creek 
bank he came upon a girl seated on the jutting 
roots of a white and tremendous sycamore—and 
halted. 

It was Shirley. 

He stood embarrassed and thinking of nothing to 
say until the girl rose and her face coloured. He 
wondered why. 

“I hear,” she said, quicker than he to fall back on 
the commonplaces of conversation, “that you’re 
going to ride in Mexico and Cuba.” 

Suddenly an insistent demand arose in him to 
make her understand that this business of riding 
races was, after all, only a means to an end, but he 
lacked the graces of expression in which to tell her 
so. 

“You folks down here,” he said with a brusque¬ 
ness born of shyness, “think that we mountain peo¬ 
ple are poor white trash. Maybe we are, but two 
hundred years back your people and mine started 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


187 

out from Virginia alike. Mine got stalled there on 
muddy roads and rotted while yours went on and 
developed. Back in Virginia we were quality 
too.” 

“Of course,” she said quietly, “you don’t have to 
tell me that.” 

“No,” he admitted shamefacedly, “but I want 
you to know. You know my uncle Fletch. . . . 

You know he’s trash. . . . You know that I’m 

a jockey—and jockeys are servants that people like 
you pay wages to. But I’m riding in races to make 
money . . . for a reason . . . and I’m 

studying to be a lawyer.” 

“Yes,” she answered with an almost humble note 
in her voice, “Father has told me about that. He 
said you’d be as good a lawyer as you are a jockey.” 

Suddenly the boy who had plumed himself on his 
stoicism and on a tough-fibred pride that asked no 
favours wheeled from her and covered his face with 
his hands. 

“I hated you,” he blurted out childishly, “I 
hated you because you despised me. I couldn’t bear 
to have you despise me . . . and then you drove 

me to that train.” 

The girl came over and laid a hand on his shoul¬ 
der. 

“I was nasty to you at first,” she said penitently, 
“but it was before I knew you. Driving you to the 
train wasn’t anything. I loved it. It was exciting. 



18 8 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


. . . But I’ve been thinking ever since about 

what you were going to—up there.” 

The boy turned impetuously and uncovered his 
face. He was trembling and he held his hands at 
his sides clamped into fists. 

“I’m a jockey,” he said, speaking in a panting 
brokenness of utterance. ‘‘I’m a tobacco yap . . . 
and I’m a runt. But some day I’m going to be a 
man . . . some day I’m going to be a gentle¬ 
man. . . 

The tense tragedy of his face and posture was a 
synopsis of all his recent anguish and confusion of 
mind; an index to his undigested conflicts of illiter¬ 
acy and ambition. 

Instinct told this girl that he was reacting to the 
influences of grim antecedents and that what he 
needed just now was to laugh. 

“Unless you do,” she declared with a sparkle of 
the eyes that came dancing through a mistiness of 
sympathy, “we lose our bet. We’re playing you 
across the board, Tolly.” 

She had never used his first name before, and the 
boy flinched as though under an unspeakably de¬ 
lightful shock. 

“And if I do make good,” he broke out in a fiery 
spurt of boldness which amazed himself, “I’m com¬ 
ing back to thank you—because I’ll owe it to you 
. because I love you.” 

She stood there with her cheeks blazing as her 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


189 

lashes dropped, then suddenly she raised her head 
and said with starkly simple candour, “I reckon I 
love you, too.” 

There was in the autumn air the spice of earth’s 
ripeness, and though the walnuts had shed their 
golden mantles, the hickories still clung to their 
russet and the oaks to their burgundy. Over the 
swell of the billowing pastures to the skyline lay 
the smoke-blue haze of Indian summer, and it was 
an hour or more before the boy and the girl turned 
and went slowly toward the house. 

There again at the yard fence they paused, and 
when he was about to leave, Tolliver took her hands 
in his and stood looking into her eyes. Much of 
life and the world had dropped into a forgetfulness 
for them just then, and they were vitally conscious 
only of a universe made up of dreams and centering 
around themselves. Once more the boy took the 
girl into his arms, and before he released her, he 
heard the door of the house open, and saw Paul 
Creighton standing on its threshold. 

Tolliver had always thought of this man as an 
aristocrat in feeling and actuated by a pride that 
had been able to survive the rusting away of his 
fortunes. But also he had always thought of him 
as an understanding friend, and when he had 
squirmed with the realization that Shirley belonged 
to one world and he to another, he had not applied 
the same reasoning to her father. Social distinc- 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


190 

tions had seemed to him to interpose barriers only 
between the sexes. 

Now, Paul Creighton stood as stiff as a ramrod 
and as pale as a ghost, with the lividness of fury on 
his cheeks and the affronted fire of anger raining 
from his eyes and choking his utterance. 

It was lightning that flashed from those pupils, 
and with the blistering impact of lightning it struck 
at the boy and carried a blighting understanding. 

Then “King” Creighton came forward, with his 
hands clenched at his sides and his lips furiously 
quivering. 

“I took you into my house and tried to lick you 
into the outer semblance of a gentleman,” he said, 
speaking at last with a withering deliberation, “be¬ 
cause it suited the whim of my friend to try to make 
you into something of the sort. This is my reward 
—I offer you the freedom of my place and I open 
my door to find my daughter in the arms of a stable 
boy!” 

Tolliver’s face went dead white too, and he 
straightened up to the last fraction of an inch that 
his slight stature permitted. 

His lips stirred to the anger of retort, a retort 
that should remind his accuser of the difference be¬ 
tween a man who was seeking to climb life’s ladder 
and one who had, through a pitiable infirmity of 
character, slid from its top to its lower rungs. He 
bit back that freshet of fury and inclined his head. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 191 

“I reckon,” he said with a dead quietness of tone, 
“I let my feelings run away with me. . . » I told 
her I loved her . . . and maybe I was so sur¬ 

prised when she didn’t remind me of the difference 
. . . that I went too far.” 

“I’ve tasted some mortifications before now,” 
broke out Creighton passionately. “I’ve seen my¬ 
self stripped by adversity after adversity. I live 
here in a house like that of tobacco yaps . . . 

but until to-day I’ve never been mistaken by them 
for one of themselves.” 

Once more the boy bit hard on his lip and fought 
down a leaping dizziness of anger. His lips were 
white and they stirred stiffly as he answered: 

“My father was an attorney for the state. He 
died at his post. I reckon back in Virginia his 
fathers were as good as any man’s.” 

“Leave my place,” ordered Creighton with a vio¬ 
lent gesture of his hand. “See that you never set 
foot on it again. I mean to have Colonel Parrish 
hear of this.” 

“He is going to hear of it right now—from me,” 
declared Tolliver as he turned and met Shirley’s 
eye. “I’m sorry,” he said to her simply. 

She had stood near him without a word, but the 
colour had ebbed out of her face and into her eyes 
had come a battle fire. 

“I’m sorry, too,” she declared with a tremor of 
repressed passion in her voice. “I’m sorry that my 




i 9 2 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

father has been less a gentleman than the man he’s 
insulted.” 

“Shirley-!” gasped Paul Creighton furiously 

but the girl went on impetuously: 

“You and I aren’t of age yet, Tolly. We can 
wait. I suppose we’d have to wait anyhow. But 
when we are of age—if you haven’t changed—you 
won’t find I’ve changed either. And then we won’t 
ask anybody.” 

Tolliver turned on his heel and set his feet into 
the path that led to the Colonel’s house. 

Parrish rose from his library table to greet a boy 
still pale and shaken, and for a time he let the boy 
stand there, seeking to arrange into coherence the 
disorder of his thoughts. 

Afterward the Colonel paced the room, with 
brows drawn while his visitor waited, and Tolliver 
could not guess in what channels his thoughts were 
flowing. 

“I can’t deny that I have a bit of sympathy 
for Creighton. . . .” announced the turfman at 

length, “and I don’t need to tell you I’ve a deal of 
sympathy for you.” 

“I didn’t know I was getting the swell-head,” 
moaned the boy. “And yet I’ve gone and fallen in 
love with a girl that’s a long way off from me. Up 
there, where I came from, the people are rough 
. . . and poor, but they’re as proud as hell.” 

He broke off and made a fresh beginning: “I knew 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


i 93 

that people in the lowlands looked down on moun¬ 
tain folk, but I knew, too, that the mountain folk 
look down on them. . . . Anyhow, we can’t 

undo it . . . and I wouldn’t if I could.” 

“No,” mused the Colonel, “I expect you wouldn’t 
—and I’m not sure I want you to. If you turn out 
the way I hope, you needn’t be ashamed to tell any 
girl you love her—and I won’t be ashamed to stand 
with you and tell any man that when he slurs you 
he slurs me too—but the experiment isn’t answered 
yet, son. That’s why I say—wait.” 

“I come of blood that can bide its time,” answered 
the boy, a shade bitterly, “but it’s blood that doesn’t 
forget and doesn’t give in.” 

“I’m not asking you to do either,” Parrish re¬ 
minded him. “I’m asking you to wait. If Paul 
Creighton’s gorge rises at the idea of a jockey- 
lover for his daughter, wait till you can come as a 
lawyer-lover. You’re both children yet. You 
don’t have to be misers with time. Make allow¬ 
ances for the father’s pride. Remember that it’s 
all the stiffer and all the more unreasoning because 
it has nothing left to stand on but dead memories.” 

“It’s not that I can’t understand his feelings,” ad¬ 
mitted the boy. “If I wasn’t ever going to be any¬ 
thing but a horse-jockey, I wouldn’t dare to look up 
at Shirley—but it’s not being a mountain boy that 
ought to make the difference. I’ve seen some jock¬ 
eys in the East that don’t belong in a gentleman’s 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


194 

house; but I aim to be a lawyer . . . and I aim 

to be a gentleman, too.” 

“There’s no reason why you can’t be both, son.” 

“I’m rough now, but-” The boy broke off 

and his forehead was drawn in deep thoughtfulness 
—“but I’m not the sort of rough that can’t be 
changed. There isn’t any better blood anywhere 
than comes down to me from my foreparents. They 
were the men that built this land.” 

“That’s what’s been in my mind,” Colonel Par¬ 
rish reminded him. “That’s why I’m experiment¬ 
ing with you, but I can’t vouch for you, wholly, 
until you’ve played your game out and won it.” 

“That’s fair enough,” declared Tolliver. “I’ll 
bide my time but I won’t quit.” 

There was a knock, and without waiting for an 
answer, the door opened and Paul Creighton stood 
there, still shaken by his anger. Tolliver turned 
to face the newcomer, but as he did so Parrish 
smiled and rose from his seat. 

“Just a few minutes, please, Paul,” he said. “I 
am busy just now.” 

“Busy with a boy you hire about your stables!” 
stormed Creighton. 

“Busy—” Parrish corrected him with the smile 
still on his lips, but with a warning flash in his eyes 
—“with a young man who is also my friend. Those 
who are accepted by me as equals must be accepted 
and treated so by others who come here.” 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 195 

Shirley’s father drew stiffly back as the young 
mountaineer went out, and when the door had 
closed he stormily poured out the volume of his 
anger and hurt pride while his host listened. The 
autumn afternoon spent itself toward sunset while 
the men talked, and what had been leaping blazes of 
wrath had smouldered down to ash when finally 
the Colonel called for glasses and decanters. 

“You have accused me, Paul,” said Parrish 
gravely, “of being responsible for this boy’s pre¬ 
sumption—I accept that responsibility. This thing 
has come suddenly about. It has surprised him al¬ 
most as much as you. He thought he hated Shirley 
because she held him in contempt. What he fan¬ 
cied to be hatred was an unrecognized love. The 
recognition came without warning, and when he 
found that she answered to it, the walls of impossi¬ 
bility seemed to drop down before him.” 

“I’m not interested in the steps by which his ef¬ 
frontery developed,” declared Creighton, but Par¬ 
rish lifted a hand. 

“Hear me out,” he begged. “The boy and the 
girl are both young. Several other love affairs may 
swim across the picture for them before the time 
for marriage comes. If they still want each other 
when they’re old enough to know their minds, you 
can make your decision then. Tolliver wants to be 
judged, not by what he is now, but by what he hopes 
to become. Give him that chance. Forbid them 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


196 

now and you kindle fires of rebellion. I want your 
authority to carry an apology to the lad.” 

There was hot argument—and several pourings 
from the decanter—before the father reached the 
solacing conclusion that the years would cure the 
danger which had enraged him. 

“It will wither up without forcing,” he decided. 

When he rose to go, he shook hands. 

“You have always been a good friend,” he said. 
“It’s understood, then, that the children shall not 
be forbidden from meeting in my presence, but there 
must be no writing or secret love-making.” 

Tolliver went to Mexico and Cuba, and he came 
back with a smattering of Spanish and with much 
diversified experience. He came back with a knowl¬ 
edge of many devious things of which he had taken 
no knowledge away with him, but because he had 
been anchored by a determination that was undeviat¬ 
ing and a love that was secure, he came back much 
as he had gone away. That is, except for certain 
things that he had learned out of books as well as 
out of life. 


CHAPTER XVI 


I T WAS a raw morning in April at Churchill 
Downs and Billy Moseby, the coloured trainer, 
wore his overcoat collar turned up about his 
throat as he leaned against the palings of the back- 
stretch with his stop-watch in his hand. 

Toward him as he stood there a little apart from 
the fifty or sixty scattered railbirds drifted Tommy 
Burtley of the Tribune. 

“Here we are again, Billy,” he made genial if 
bromidic comment. “It’s the first time we’ve met 
this spring. Where do you come from?” 

The coloured man waved his hand in the compre¬ 
hensive gesture of the nomad. “All over, Mr. 
Burtley,” he said. “New Orleans last, but before 
that Havana and down Mexico way.” 

“And now,” laughed the newspaper man, “back 
again to the old stamping-ground doping the Derby 
six weeks ahead.” 

“Yes, sir,” responded the coloured man gravely, 
“back to the old home track. Down in them winter 
places I feel like I was in an outdoor pool room, but 
here—it’s different.” 

Through the gates came a big brown stallion nei- 
197 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


198 

ther high nor low in flesh with a blood bay at his 
side, and the Negro’s eyes brightened. 

“Thar he comes, white man,” he exclaimed. “He 
got here yesterday from the farm. I reckon you 
don’t need to ask his name this year, do you?” 

Burtley grinned. “If I had to ask Fleetwing’s 
name,” he admitted, “I couldn’t hold my job long 
on the sporting page. And this time I won’t forget 
to snap my own watch on him.” 

“Time him all you like, and print whatever you’ve 
a mind to now, Mister Burtley. He don’t need his 
secrets kept any longer—he’s public property these 
days—but did the old man lie to you a year ago? 
Did I call the turn on that baby or not?” 

“I’m told,” commented Tommy irrelevantly, 
“that Colonel Parrish has been offered seventy-five 
thousand for the colt.” 

“Yes, I heard that, too, and he didn’t dally long 
over giving ‘No’ for his answer. Why would he? 
The colt’s only got to win the Derby, the Preakness, 
and the Belmont—just them three—to earn more 
than what was offered.” 

“But he has to win them all,” amended Burtley, 
“and no horse has ever won them all yet.” 

“Thar’s one that will—unless he goes wrong—or 

-” The speaker left his proviso unfinished and 

the newspaper man prompted him. 

“Or what, Billy?” 

“If they ever have to put any other boy up on 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 199 

him excusin’ ‘Thetaway’ Cornett, he’s as liable as 
not to run the wrong way of the track again or stand 
still—or turn summersets.” 

“Hasn’t he been cured of that crazy streak yet?” 

The trainer shook his head. “Not to my knowl¬ 
edge,” he answered. “Colonel Parrish has got the 
hoss of this generation right there, Mr. Burtley. It 
ain’t that he’s just an uncommon speedy colt—it’s 
like as if he were a different breed of animal that 
can run faster than the hoss-breed.” He shook his 
head and added reflectively: “An’ yet any time you 
switch jockeys on him he’s apt to quit cold and let a 
bunch of dogs trail past him.” 

“The colt made the boy as much as the boy made 
the colt,” mused Tommy. “I’ll gamble on Cor¬ 
nett to stick to the Parrish colours.” 

The coloured man nodded. 

“He seems level-headed enough,” he admitted, 
“but the Derby this year’s goin’ to be a mighty big 
race. There’s men in the East that would give 
more to carry off that horseshoe of roses an’ that 
silver cup than the purse is worth. There’s men 
that set monstrous store by saddlin’ the winner, re¬ 
gardless of what it costs.” 

He paused and wagged his head dubiously before 
he added: “An’ maybe I’m not the only man that’s 
had a certain hunch.” 

“What hunch, Billy?” 

“That the one lonesome chance any Easterner’s 


200 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


got this year to cop that prize is—to split Fleetwing 
and Cornett apart.” 

Tom Burtley shot a swift glance at the boy who at 
that moment galloped by on the big brown and eased 
him to a walk. 

“And that boy,” he admitted meditatively, “needs 
big money. He needs it bad. He’s bent on carry¬ 
ing on his father’s fight.” Suddenly he demanded, 
“Billy, you went the rounds of the winter tracks 
where ‘Thetaway’ was free-lancing. How did h$ 
behave?” 

The coloured man made his reply judicially. 

“He kep’ himself to himself. The other boys 
in the jockey-room didn’t have much use for him. 
They called him a tight-wad an’ a ridin’ parson—but 
he went right on lookin’ solemn and makin’ money 
and puttin’ all he got into the sock—an’ studyin’ his 
books when he wasn’t workin’.” 

“So you think he didn’t fall for the bright lights 
—even in Havana?” 

“No, sir, I’m confident he didn’t, but-” 

“But what?” 

“But he looked to me like he plum worshipped 
money—an’ that’s what I’m studyin’ about now. 
They’ll cover this track with greenbacks to get a 
holt on him. They’ll outbid the devil to take him 
away from the man that could, as easy as not, have 
sewed him up with a contract tight as wax for three 
years.” 



201 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

The coloured man fell silent, for “Thetaway” 
himself had slid from the saddle now and turned his 
mount over to a stable boy, and with Colonel Par¬ 
rish he came over and shook hands with Burtley. 

“Your colt looks as good as ever, Colonel,” ven¬ 
tured the reporter, and the turfman smiled as he an¬ 
swered: 

“He’s as sound as a dollar so far—but there are 
six weeks yet in which he may bow a tendon or split 

a hoof or take a cold-” he paused there, then 

added—“or in which something might happen to 
Cornett.” 

“It’s all a game of chance, Colonel,” admitted the 
younger man, “but, barring accident, it looks like a 
grand season for you—with the big prizes at your 
mercy.” 

“It looks so good to me,” acceded Parrish sober¬ 
ly, “that I’m afraid of it. It looks so easy that I 
feel as if the old hoodoo must be lurking behind 
some corner with his piece of gas-pipe neatly 
wrapped for a wallop. The thing my heart is most 
set on is this Derby—here at home.” 

Moseby nodded a sympathetic head. 

“There ain’t no other race like it,” he declared, 
as if answering a litany. “I rode in the first one— 
back in ’seventy-five when the purse wasn’t quite 
three thousand. I rode Bob Woolley—an’ Aris¬ 
tides won. Then two years later on I brought in 
the winner. It was Baden-Baden that year an’ I beat 



202 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


Bobby Swim on Leonard in the stretch. I reckon 
you remember Bobby Swim, don’t you, Colonel?” 

The turfman smiled. “I remember him. It 
seems hard to realize that any turfman has forgot¬ 
ten him.” 

Tolliver stood looking at these elders as they 
talked, and Burtley stood looking at Cornett, won¬ 
dering what was in his mind. To the veteran 
breeder and the veteran trainer that long span of 
years and experience stood not only for a series of 
events in which men gambled on horses. To both 
of them it was a thing surrounded and hallowed by 
tradition, and to their memories came back the thun¬ 
der through stretches of champions long dead but 
still alive in history. 

Some day, thought Tolliver, when his job was 
done, he should like to look forward to some such 
life as Parrish’s had been. He should like to see 
fine animals develop out of long-legged foals, at the 
side of royal matrons, into handicap contenders run¬ 
ning in his own silks . . . and after that retir¬ 

ing as sires and dams themselves, carrying the strain 
down to new generations. He should like a home, 
in such an atmosphere, with the girl he loved. But 
his future was sternly fixed and dedicated to less 
gracious and self-indulgent uses—and when what¬ 
ever fortune he could build was spent, as he must 
spend it, the little day that bounds a jockey’s golden 
opportunity would have closed—and there would 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 203 

be for it no redawning. It was a life that ran to a 
quick end. What would be left after all to offer to 
the girl who was herself a thoroughbred? 

His face was unsmilingly grim as he stood there 
on that April morning. 

* * * 

The Cartley stock farm stands a few miles out of 
Lexington and to it visitors make pilgrimages, be¬ 
cause in a land of famous studs it stands as one of 
the most notable. Here pastures of lush bluegrass, 
shaded by oak and walnut, give bountiful grazing 
and the limestone water builds greatness of bone, 
but that is true also of other and lesser farms. 
Here an owner, who visited his place only occasion¬ 
ally though it was the apple of his eye, had been able 
to lavish on its development every attribute of com¬ 
pleteness, so that its barns and paddocks and train¬ 
ing tracks were all models of their kind. Here 
visitors are taken, as if visiting royalty, to see the 
sires that stand in the stud there, headed by the 
mighty stallion who was imported from England 
with a Three-Thousand-Guineas, a Derby, a St. 
Leger, and a St. James Park to his credit. It is a 
plant possible of attainment only to the turfman 
who has enthusiasm and millions. 

J. C. Cartley, who also maintained a stock farm 
in the East, was setting his heart this year on sweep¬ 
ing the three-year-old board with a son of the Brit- 


204 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


ish horse that he had called King George, and in his 
house on Madison Avenue he was conferring to that 
end with George Breck, who handled for him the 
hulk of his racing interests. These were interests 
of large scope in themselves yet only a part of the 
Cartley activities and a part more wrapped in senti¬ 
ment than in the need or wish for gain. 

“The colt,” said Breck thoughtfully, “has round- 
ed-to nicely during the winter and he’s as right as a 
trivet. If he trains on during the next few weeks 
without mishap he ought to give an argument to any 
man’s horse.” 

“An argument isn’t enough,” smiled Cartley. 
“He’s got to give a drubbing to every man’s horse 
—and as a two-year-old he was always knocking at 
the door but he never quite got in.” 

“That part of it doesn’t make me lose any sleep,” 
declared the manager. “He had a bad leg last year 
and he’s a late developer. I didn’t make you any 
rash promises about him in two-year-old form, 
did I?” 

“No.” 

“Well, I’m making promises now. He’s an¬ 
swered my questions this year,” went on Breck con¬ 
fidently, “and I have no fault to find—or wouldn’t 
have if it were any other year.” 

Cartley raised his brows. 

“Why any other year?” he questioned, and his 
major-domo laughed. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 205 

“Because if that colt of Parrish’s goes on as he’s 
started, no man’s horse can hold his pace without 
hitting the stretch dizzy and drunk. I don’t usu¬ 
ally kick on another man’s good fortune—but with 
Fleetwing it’s like racing horses against a wild 
duck.” 

“What assurance have you,” inquired the owner 
of King George, “that the three-year-old Fleetwing 
will be as great a horse as the two-year-old?” 

“None,” answered Breck, “and that’s the hope 
we’re banking on. Barring Fleetwing we need ask 
no favours—but that one looks to be a super horsf 
and we might as well admit it.” 

Cartley puffed contemplatively on his after 
luncheon cigar, and after an interval of silence, the 
manager spoke musingly as if to himself: 

“There’s a feature to it that’s unusual. The im¬ 
pression seems to prevail that Fleetwing will run his 
race for only one boy—‘Thetaway’ Cornett.” 

“And Parrish has no contract on his services.” 

“No-o, that’s the unique angle of the situation. 
The boy is free so far as contract goes. I’d like to 
make him an offer, Mr. Cartley.” 

Cartley looked suddenly up. 

“Do you feel that he could be legitimately ap¬ 
proached? I shouldn’t care to do anything un¬ 
ethical.” He fell silent for a space, then shook his 
head. “If it were a case of trying to get Cornett 
because we genuinely wanted the boy, I suppose 


20 6 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go after him— 
but if it’s just to keep him off another man’s horse it 
wouldn’t do.” 

Breck shrugged his shoulders. 

“Leave that phase out of consideration, then,” he 
suggested, “though even from that angle it’s fair 
enough. Parrish might have put his boy under con¬ 
tract—and he didn’t. That’s his own affair and 
he’s bound by the consequences. But aside from 
keeping ‘Thetaway’ Cornett off Fleetwing, you 
couldn’t make a better investment than in getting 
him signed up on your staff.” 

“If you approach Cornett,” remarked Cartley 
decisively, “it must be with the full knowledge of his 
employer. I insist on that. The rest is up to 
you.” 

“How far may I go—in the matter of salary?” 
inquired Breck and his employer laughed shortly. 

“That’s up to you, too,” he asserted. Then sud¬ 
denly he leaned forward and brought his fist 
down, not violently but in soft emphasis on the 
table. 

“I want the Derby and I want the Suburban and 
the Belmont,” he said, “but I want the Derby most 
—I don’t care a whoop about the stakes. You can 
go so far as to tell that boy that if he brings my silks 
in first in any or all of those events he may regard 
each purse as a bonus to go to him in addition to his 
salary.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 207 

George Breck looked up, and his eyes took on an 
expression of wonderment as if he had been jolted 
by a stiff armed jab that had dazed him. 

“Am I dreaming, Mr. Cartley?” he demanded. 
“Say that again if you really did say it.” And Cart- 
ley said it again. 

“There’s only one answer any boy in his right 
mind can make to that proposition,” observed the 
manager of the Cartley stud, “and after all this one 
bids fair to be the season’s premier jockey. As such 
he belongs in the black-and-blue jacket. Parrish is 
a strong man on the turf but Cornett has graduated 
into our class.” 

That same evening Breck took a train for Ken¬ 
tucky, having wired for a joint meeting with Colonel 
Parrish and his jockey. 

. It was in Colonel Parrish’s hotel room that the 
three came together. 

George Breck, though he had persuaded himself 
that his purpose was ethically as well as technically 
irreproachable, went up in the elevator with the 
sense of one charged with an embarrassing mission. 
When Parrish opened the door there was back of 
Breck’s smile a shadow of anxious gravity. 

“I might as well get right down to brass tacks,” 
began the Cartley emissary awkwardly. “I didn’t 
want to take any step in this matter except with your 
full knowledge, Colonel. I want to lay all my cards 
face up.” 


208 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


“You mean,” Parrish spoke slowly, “that you 
want my boy. Is that right?” 

Breck nodded with the feeling of one thrown on 
the defensive as he amplified, “My understanding 
is that Cornett has no contract with you—that he’s 
free to act as he sees fit.” 

“Yes, that’s true . . . and I’ve seen this 
coming.” The self-control of years kept the fea¬ 
tures of the Woodford County man steady, but in¬ 
side him he felt a nausea of disappointment as he 
saw the future of his great colt so absurdly yet dan¬ 
gerously threatened with collapse. 

“Yes,” he forced himself to go on, “and now, 
having shown me the courtesy of an explanation, the 
rest of your business is with him. He’s a minor of 
course—but I suppose his mother will ratify his de¬ 
cision.” 

Brent turned to the boy. 

“I understand you’re ambitious,” he began, “and 
when you ride in Cartley colours you ride for as 
prominent a stable as there is. The salary-” 

He paused, and Tolliver, whose face had lost 
some of its bronzed colour, stood waiting. He had 
given no indication of any kind as to what reactions 
were stirring in him as he listened. Now he 
prompted jerkily and in a queer voice: 

“Yes, what about the pay?” 

Breck named a figure at which the boy gave an 
involuntary start of amazement, then without giving 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 209 

time for any answer the manager launched his cli¬ 
max: “Mr. Cartley races for the satisfaction of 
winning,” he said. “The Derby and the Suburban 
and the Belmont are the things he covets most—the 
purses of each and all of these that you win will 
go to you as a bonus.” 

Tolliver Cornett braced himself as if against the 
buffet of a breaker, and instinctively his eyes turned 
to Parrish. Parrish himself had winced at that 
bolt of unprecedented prodigality. He moistened 
his lips with his tongue. 

“I don’t see, son,” he said dismally, “how you can 
well refuse.” 


CHAPTER XVII 


HE boy turned away for a moment and 



stood with his eyes fixed on the raised sash, 


JL and they seemed unreadably sullen eyes. In 
his mind some storm was gathering that let no in¬ 
dication of its emotions escape outward, and Breck 
suggested when the silence had outlasted his pa¬ 
tience : 

“Perhaps you’ll want to think it over, maybe talk 
with your mother.” 

“No,” said Tolliver slowly and speaking with an 
evident effort, “I don’t need to talk it over with any¬ 
body. Only one person could counsel me and he’s 
dead. I’m ready to give you my answer right now.” 

“Good,” exclaimed Breck, “we can draw the con¬ 
tracts later. All I want now is the one word ‘Ac¬ 
ceptance’ to wire to Mr. Cartley.” 

Tolliver shook his head. 

“That’s not the word, Mr. Breck,” he said. “The 
word’s ‘No.’ ” 

“No! Do you realize what I’m offering? Do 
you know what those stakes are worth in money?” 

“I know what every one of them has been worth 
in money for years past,” answered the boy steadily, 


210 


211 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

“and I know what money means to me 
and why . . . and Colonel Parrish knows, too, 

. but I’m riding those races in Parrish col¬ 
ours this year.” 

Breck stood in the dismay of one who realizes the 
futility of arguing with unreason, and it was Par¬ 
rish himself who spoke, and spoke against his own 
interests. 

“Son,” he urged, “I know what’s in your mind. 
You realize that this money isn’t being offered you 
to ride King George, so much as to take you off 
Fleetwing. You know, too, that with you up Fleet¬ 
wing has the season in a sling—and without you he’s 
beaten already. He’d be a centaur with the man- 
part cut off. . . . But that’s sentiment and I’d 

be the last man to let you sacrifice yourself to sen¬ 
timent.” 

“Fleetwing and I started together,” said the boy 
obdurately, “and we aren’t ready to dissolve part¬ 
nership yet.” 

“I’m going to give you a chance to change your 
mind,” suggested Breck persuasively. “I’ll see you 
again to-morrow.” 

“There isn’t any use in that,” Tolliver told him 
seriously. “I’m mightily obliged to you. It’s the 
most generous offer I ever heard of—but my mind’s 
made up.” 

It was after George Breck had gone that the boy 
turned impulsively to Parrish. 


212 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


“The reason I let him talk on,” he said apolo¬ 
getically, “was that I wanted you to hear what he 
had to say. I hope you don’t think I had any no¬ 
tion of quitting you.” 

“I know what your heart is set on,” answered 
Parrish brusquely. “I know that you regard money 
as artillery and ammunition for your fight—not to 
mention the making of your own home some day— 
and he almost offered you the kingdoms of the 
earth.” 

The boy’s eyes darkened and became inscrutable 
again with that seeming of sullenness which was 
his defense against emotion. 

“Where’d I be now—except for you?” he de¬ 
manded. “If it was just avenging him and not how 
I did it, I could have settled the score before this— 
by lying in the laurel with a gun. He didn’t fight 
that way and I don’t fight by deserting my friends 
for money. I reckon I can make enough without 
that. . . . Did you look for this to happen, 

Colonel?” 

The turfman nodded his head. 

“I’ve been waiting for it,” he said, “and wonder¬ 
ing what you’d say. I couldn’t have blamed you.” 

“I’ve been waiting for it, too,” announced Tolli¬ 
ver, “and I’ve known right well what I’d say.” 

Colonel Parrish sat at the table of the hotel room 
and rapped with his fingers on its top. His eyes 
were still thought-clouded and after a long pause he 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 213 

said: “I ought to thank you for this, but I’m not 
going to try—just now.” 

“You don’t have to thank me,” came the quiet 
response. “I epcpect we understand each other. 
You know what I’ve got to do—and you know be¬ 
sides that there’s another job ahead of me.” 

“A matter of a girl?” smiled the older man, and 
the head of the younger came down with an em¬ 
phatic affirmation. 

“The matter of making good as a gentleman,” 
responded Tolliver. “As I understand it, gentle¬ 
men don’t quit their friends cold for a quick profit.” 

^ * 

Derby Day was drawing near. Tolliver and 
Colonel Parrish were standing outside the stall in 
which Fleetwing munched his oats, a picture of 
fitness. 

Save for that final whetting of his preparation, 
which should put the last-minute edge on his con¬ 
ditioning—and which must not be undertaken too 
far ahead—the colt was ready now to be saddled 
for the issue. The boy who was to ride him, too, 
had trained as one must who faces championship 
opposition, and was seeking to keep his mind free 
of all else, until the race had been run. 

Then it was that he looked up to see, as he had 
seen once before in this place, a messenger from 
the Mountains. This time it was not Cal Deering 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


214 

but an old man who preached the Gospel. Brother 
Littlefield was such a character as is developed only 
in the unique life of the Appalachians, a self-taught 
practitioner of rude medicine and unordained 
preacher of the Gospel. Gaunt and rugged of 
stature, fearless and fervent of spirit, his place was 
one in that strange community like the place of no 
other. In youth he had drunk and fought and made 
common lot with the wildest. 

In maturer years he had “tuck a come-through ter 
ther mourner’s bench” one “big-meetin’ time,” and 
since that day he had gone on fighting with an even 
greater militance, but he had fought under the col¬ 
ours of a rough-hewn religion. His tempestuous 
exhortations played on the emotions of those crowds 
that came together for the revivals, where a hysteria 
of religious excitation kindled and blazed under 
his hot gospelling—and at other times he made 
long and “slavish” journeys ministering to the iso¬ 
lated sick. 

Among inimical clan elements he walked safely 
as a neutral, trusted by both sides and invested 
with something like the character of a wilderness 
saint. 

Now Brother Littlefield had come to Churchill 
Downs, a place which he regarded as an outlying 
province of hell, a day or two before the opening 
of the spring meeting. He came with scowling eyes 
that blistered the attaches of that evil place as he 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 215 

demanded brusquely to be directed to “Leetle Tolly 
Cornett.” 

When he had found the boy at last he insisted that 
he “hev speech with him straightaway—an’ with- 
outen no one else hearkenin’.” 

Tolliver turned with him and led the way to the 
emptiness of the far turn, and here under the lee 
of the tall outer fence he halted and said, in the old 
phrases that his visitor would accept as the speech 
of “home-folks,” “I’m hearkenin’ to ye, Brother 
Littlefield.” 

The old man’s eyes flashed ember-like as he sur¬ 
veyed the “trappin’s an’ fixin’s of Belial” that sur¬ 
rounded him, but when he spoke he said nothing of 
them. 

“Folks tells hit thet ye aims ter punish ther men 
thet slew yore pappy, Tolly. Air thet right?” 

“So help me God Almighty,” came the instant and 
earnest response. 

“Folks gives hit out likewise, thet ye’re seekin’ 
ter hev a new law passed thet’ll cause murderers ter 
be tried outside ther mountings, afore an upright 
an’ an unchased jedge, air thet right too?” 

“As true as gospel, Brother Littlefield.” 

“An’ what evidence hev ye got ter lay afore thet 
co’t when ye goes thar?” 

The boy shook his head with an uneasy sense of 
having no answer ready. 

“So far,” he said, “I’ve been seeking to earn 


21 6 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


money because it’ll take a lavish of money. When 
I come of age and have the money and the knowl¬ 
edge of law I aim to go back home and spend my life 
working up the case.” 

The old preacher stood shaking his head in frank 
disapproval of that programme. 

“Hit won’t do,” he declared incisively. “Men 
dies an’ fergits, an’ folks thet’ll talk terday falls 
silent termorrer. By ther time ye comes of age 
hit’ll be too tardy.” 

Tolliver gazed eagerly into the face of the rag¬ 
ged old shepherd. 

“What do you counsel, then?” he asked. 

“I didn’t fare down hyar so much ter offer ye 
counsel as ter fotch ye a message,” he said. “Thar’s 
a man thet lives on Little Greasy, whar hit heads up 
at, thet could tell ye a lavish ye needs ter know— 
an’ he’s a’dyin’.” 

“Dying,” echoed the boy. “Won’t he tell you?” 

“He won’t tell nobody save you,” went on the 
preacher, “an’ he wouldn’t suffer me ter write ye no 
letter. I journeyed down hyar twic’t afore this past 
winter, but ye war ridin’ gamblin’ hosses away off 
in furrin’ parts, an’ I hed ter turn my face back with¬ 
out seein’ ye. I come ergin now because some one 
named hit ter me thet he’d read yore name in a 
newspaper an’ hit said ye war here.” 

“Here and hearkening,” declared the boy. 

“This man,” went on the preacher, “he was hired 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 217 

by Malone, an’ he knows hit all, an’ so fur Malone 
don’t suspicion him none. Las’ winter when ther 
snow commenced ter fly, I fotched thet pore bedev¬ 
illed transgressor ter ther feet of ther Lord 
A’mighty an’ showed him his sin. I bruck ther ice 
an’ baptized him, an’ he has ther heart an’ cravin’ 
ter go afore ther jedgment seat withouten no black 
secrets layin’ heavy on his soul.” 

“You mean he’s ready to confess—and won’t do 
it except to me?” 

“I means he’s done been nigh ter death some siv- 
’ral times afore now an’ he’s done rallied. He 
kain’t skeercely rally no more. He’s got right se¬ 
vere smotherin’ spells an’ ther winter’s done wore 
him out.” 

Tolliver knew that in the language of the hills 
“smothering spells” meant advanced tuberculosis, 
frequent penalty of tight and windowless cabins— 
and he shuddered inwardly as he thought of that 
depleted wretch being baptized by immersion 
through broken ice. 

“He wants ter cross ther river in peace with 
God,” went on the revivalist. “What he’s got ter 
say moughtn’t skeercely amount ter a full confession 
afore ther law—but he kin give ye ther names of 
every man thet mout be persuaded ter speak ther 
truth—an’ he kin give ye ther each an’ every of ther 
whole devilment ter layway yore pap an’ murder 
him.” 


2l8 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


There was a pause there and a change of tone to 
solemn warning: 

“But thar hain’t no time ter fritter away ner 
waste. Ye’ye got ter make a soon start an’ fare 
back thar with me like es ef ye war a-borryin’ fire.” 

Tolliver Cornett stood suddenly engulfed in the 
throes of a monstrous dilemma. There was a lit¬ 
tle more than a week before Derby day, and that 
time would be enough—if he could be sure of going 
and coming without hitch or delay. When he went 
into that country, though, he could take no such 
assurance with him. Another man might slip in 
and slip out unnoticed, but he was stamped and 
branded by his diminutive stature, beyond hope of 
disguise or the escaping of recognition. 

A giant could walk among pygmies with as much 
hope of going unobserved—as a pygmy among 
giants. Yet the whole edifice of his future was 
building toward an end in which such information 
as offered itself here was archpin and keystone— 
and the opportunity would neither wait nor come 
again. 

“Brother Littlefield,” he said soberly, “you don’t 
understand the conditions here. There are men 
that would give ten thousand dollars—and make 
money on the bargain—if they could keep me out of 
Louisville a week from next Saturday. There may 
be men up there in the mountains who know that. 

. . . Are you sure this one on the headwaters 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


219 

of Little Greasy isn’t seeking to deceive both you 
and me? Are you plumb, dead sure he isn’t baiting 
a trap for another one of Malone’s laywayin’s?” 

The old preacher stiffened a little and his voice 
was that of hurt pride. 

“I didn’t ’low ye’d suspicion me, Tolly,” he said. 
“I ’lowed every man confidenced me when I coun¬ 
selled ’em. I’ve done told ye this man lay nigh ter 
death. Hit hain’t no snare bein’ sot afore yore feet 
—albeit, I reckon yore pap would hev risked even 
thet ef need be.” 

Tolliver’s chin snapped up. 

“All right, Brother Littlefield. I’m going with 
you.” 

Alone with Parrish, the boy explained his situa¬ 
tion, and though the turfman’s face wore again the 
anxiety that had come over it as he listened to 
Breck’s proposal, he offered no dissuading influence. 

“I don’t have to be told that you’ll be back here 
if it’s possible for you to come,” he said gravely, 
“and I know what counts above everything else in 
your life—but I’m gravely apprehensive, son.” He 
paused and added, “Not only for my racing pros¬ 
pects but for you.” 

“I’ll be heedful,” Tolliver assured him. “I won’t 
go in at Hixon Town. I’ll strike Pine Mountain 
and work back along the trails that wiggle and win- 
gle along there—and if I have luck I’ll be out again 
before Malone knows I’ve come.” 


220 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


But Malone knew. 

The loosely articulated yet effective secret service 
which had enabled him and Cropper to maintain 
their ascendency caught up and relayed the tidings 
to Hixon headquarters that “Leetle Tolly” Cornett 
had crossed Pine Mountain, afoot, travelling with 
Brother Littlefield. It amplified that he was “hid¬ 
in’ out” somewhere near Brother Littlefield’s house. 

There the information ended. There the trail 
turned cold. Even Malone made no effort to extort 
information from the preacher by persuasion or 
fear. The medieval principle of sanctuary still 
held as to the evangelist’s house and guests, but 
slowly a cordon drew around that neighbourhood 
and set a watch on every egress from it, like a circle 
of unseen but ready cats watching a rat-hole. By 
those intangible ways of the wilderness the rat had 
warning but sometime—and sometime before Derby 
day in Louisville—he would have to make a run for 
it; would need to attempt escape. Then one or 
more of the cats would be ready—since it needed no 
declaration that the rat had come there for one pur¬ 
pose only, and in coming had declared war. 

Tolliver Cornett was actually keeping himself 
hidden in a loft over the cabin where one Mose 
Crosby lay dying of tuberculosis. Casual visitors 
talking empty things, but thinking deeply, dropped 
in there and left without enriching their information 
while the boy crouched overhead. He had finished 


221 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

his work and had written down and memorized the 
names of some eight or ten men who, if approached 
in the precisely right way and at precisely the right 
time with assurances of protection, were ready to 
speak the truth on the witness stand—or might be. 
It would take months to work those threads into a 
net strong enough and broad enough to enmesh and 
snare the old wolf who ran at the head of his pack 
—but at least the beginnings were in hand. The 
trick now was to get out of that particular spot of 
the steep wilderness and piece together the garnered 
scraps of knowledge, but for all his burning fever of 
impatience the boy knew that he was timing a race 
against death now, in which a false start or a mis¬ 
calculation of speed or course would be fatal. 

He knew, though, that he had gained one point. 
The enemy did not suspect that he had gone to the 
cabin of Mose Crosby, and out of its dark door he 
slipped after moon-set on a night selected, not be¬ 
cause it was a specially hopeful occasion, but because 
it was the last one that held the possibility of get¬ 
ting back to Louisville in time. His plan was a 
bold one, using the assumption that the enemy would 
expect him to make his try for a slipping out over 
Pine Mountain as he had come in, and that the ene¬ 
my’s strength would be concentrated along that 
route. So with the guidance of a bold youth who 
knew every foot of obscure trail and who furnished 
one mule which the two of them should use after the 


222 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


mountain fashion of “tying and riding,” he started 
out along the shorter and more open road to Hixon 
Town. Through the night they went like cautious 
snails, and when daylight came the guide would ride 
ahead on the mouse-coloured mule for several miles 
reconnoitering the way and leaving behind him sig¬ 
nals of bent and broken twigs. Then he would dis¬ 
mount and hitch his “critter,” going ahead on foot 
-—and still reconnoitering. Tolliver would come 
up to the tethered beast and ride openly so far as 
the signs held assertion of safety—and because this 
bold strategy had not been anticipated it held them 
safe for most of the journey to the town. 

Sometimes the guide would scent danger and wait 
for his follower or go back to meet him and send 
him, by detours, over the wooded hills. . . . 

In that fashion Hixon was reached without mis¬ 
hap, and through its surprised streets at sunset just 
before train time the boy walked boldly, trusting 
that in that publicity he might count on a brief in¬ 
terval of fair safety. Because he was not expected 
in the town itself he reached the station unharmed 
and swung himself aboard the train just as the con¬ 
ductor waved his hand to the engine cab to pull out 
on the northerly and westerly run. 

So far he had reasoned well and his reasoning 
had saved his life. Back along the other way he 
could not have passed. It was an ingenious series 
of ambuscades. The “laurel hells” there bristled 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 223 

with hidden guns. But the minds that had planned 
that trapping were flexible and quick-thinking minds, 
and even while he walked the little length of the 
main street they were realizing their error and re¬ 
vising their tactics. 

Tolliver took his place in the dingy smoking com¬ 
partment of the single coach. Except for a man 
who sat heavily slouched in the stupor of drink he 
had the place to himself. The train rumbled out 
of the station and halted again at the far edge of 
the town, where stood the water tower. 

The engine filled its boiler tanks, and its whistle 
screeched. 

Tolliver smiled as he ventured to look out of the 
window on the place which the twilight was taking. 
Then a shot cracked from a pile of stacked ties by 
the side of the water tower. The boy leaned for¬ 
ward in an attitude of one puzzled by the sound. 
He became aware that his shirt was moist against 
his chest. He pressed his hand under his coat, and 
in the yellow lamplight of the smoking car, it came 
away red. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


T HE morning of Derby day brought cloud¬ 
ed skies and a pattering of large rain drops 
which thousands of race-goers prayed fer¬ 
vently might prove a clearing shower. Almost all 
night thunder-laden clouds had sluiced down 
deluges, and the track which had yesterday been 
lightning fast and springy as pasteboard was a 
welter of mud, with the coveted path along the rail 
and broader patches about the turns lying fetlock 
deep under water. 

Scores of thousands of eyes looked out gloomily 
through wet window panes, and scores of thousands 
of tongues sighed or grumbled or swore each after 
its caste and kind. 

The field of ten starters named in the overnight 
nominations would be reduced by the withdrawal of 
every colt that was not bred or built for heavy go¬ 
ing. All save the soundest and stoutest hearted 
would decline the issue of the starter’s flag when the 
route lay through deep and holding mud. Those 
regulars to whom the betting shed was a Mecca and 
the betting instinct a stinging fever foresaw a slow- 
run race and the need for total revision of their cal¬ 
culations, and those to whom the occasion meant 


224 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 225 

only a holiday saw the spirit of its gaiety extin¬ 
guished. 

J. C. Cartley, in the private car that lay on a side 
track, secure from the overcrowded petulance of the 
town, was one who neither frowned nor swore. 

The special from New York to which his car had 
been attached had arrived at daylight, and upon 
George Breck’s arrival with the morning papers 
had come unexpected encouragement of spirit. 

“This weather is made to order for the King,” 
announced the manager with a pleasure which he 
made no effort to conceal. “The form-sheet cata¬ 
logues our colt as a superior mudder—and the 
form-sheet is dead right. He never lost even a 
two-year-old race when the slush was deep. He 
eats mud.” 

“He never met a field like this in either mud or 
dust, though,” the owner reminded him. 

“There’s nothing in this field that can take any 
liberties with him—except Fleetwing,” declared 
Breck assertively, “and as to Fleetwing there’s a 
funny rumour going the rounds.” 

The well groomed Easterner stiffened his compact 
shoulders with a quickened interest. “What ru¬ 
mour?” he demanded, almost greedily. 

“Parrish’s boy hasn’t been seen about the track 
since the opening here—and Parrish isn’t saying 
where he is. I could understand the Colonel’s go¬ 
ing so far as to keep him off other mounts until the 


226 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


big race is run—though it’s crowding caution pretty 
far. That lad isn’t popular with the other jocks 
and it’s thoroughly believed that without him the 
Electron trick is a rudderless boat. Somebody 
might try to put him over the fence—but why in 
Hades should he be kept out of sight entirely?” 

Cartley nodded gravely, then smiled with good 
humour. 

“I hope Colonel Parrish doesn’t think we mean to 
kidnap his boy after failing to entice him,” he said. 

“Moreover, ‘Thetaway’ Cornett has always 
given Fleetwing his keying-up work before,” went 
on the manager of the Cartley stud, “and during the 
past week ‘Snip’ Button has had the leg-up in the 
workouts.” 

“How did he handle the colt?” demanded Cart¬ 
ley. 

“So-so,” Breck shrugged his shoulders, “but 
Jimmy Earle is fifteen pounds better boy than But¬ 
ton—and all the money I’ve got is saying that Fleet¬ 
wing, with Button up, isn’t that much better colt 
than the King.” 

“What’s your own idea about Cornett?” 

“I’m just guessing, like the rest. One rumour is 
that the boy’s sick and they’re hoping against hope 
he’ll be able to ride. If that’s true it raises a fresh 
question: can a sick boy hold that double-handful of 
colt together and rate him and keep him straight on 
crowded turns?” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 227 

“I wonder,” mused the millionaire. “I see here 
in the list of starters and probable jockeys what 
seems to me a significant entry: Fleetwing—to be 
ridden by Cornett or Button.” 

Breck nodded his head quickly. 

“Those last two words that you read,” he de¬ 
clared, “set the turfites sizzling this morning. Un¬ 
til they read it there wasn’t much argument except 
as to what would finsh second and third. Now a 
good fifty per cent, of them are busy hedging their 
bets and covering up.” 

“This is all distinctly encouraging,” smiled Cart- 
ley. “What is your precise plan of campaign—in 
view of these developments?” 

“We are saddling King George and Starflash, as 
you know,” the manager outlined briskly. “Jimmy 
Earle has the leg-up on the King and Falkes pilots 
Starflash. That youngster is the quickest breaker on 
the track to-day and he ought to get a step at the 
gate. He’s to carry them all along at a killing pace 
as far as he can hold up—and he ought to have 
most of them drunk and staggering at the end of a 
mile, which is just about where he’ll fade out of the 
foreground. Earle is to lay behind the pace and 
make his move to come through with the King when 
they’re burned up. Of course if Cornett’s in the 
pigskin—and himself—Fleetwing won’t burn up 
easy . . . but if not . . .” 

“If not we’re in already,” assented the owner, 


228 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


though with an indulgent smile for his manager’s 
eager confidence. 

“And besides that don’t forget the weather,” 
Breck reminded his principal. “The Electron is 
built for endurance, but there’s that old quirk of 
temper or temperament, or whatever you choose to 
call it, about him. None of his victories has been 
on a muddy track—and it may stop him.” 

In front of the stall where the colt that had been 
an odds-on favourite until this morning, stood 
munching his oats, Colonel Parrish in a wrinkled 
raincoat was pacing the tanbark and his face held a 
gloom that he sought vainly to disguise. Not far 
away, pallid and with anxious smudges under her 
eyes, stood Shirley Creighton, who hadn’t slept 
much the night before. Paul Creighton, too, wan¬ 
dered aimlessly about the place making a great 
show, which deceived no one, of inspecting gear and 
registering optimism. 

Parrish went quietly over to the girl and spoke 
slowly: “It’s no good to fire telegrams into Hixon,” 
he said. “I know he meant to go and come over 
Pine Mountain and that’s pure wilderness—but as 
soon as the race is run I'm going to start for the 
mountains myself.” 

She knew what it meant to him to mention the 
race so casually, and she knew, too, that it was not 
pretense that put it into secondary place in his anx¬ 
iety. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


229 

“The crowds are pouring in,” she reminded him 
in an anguished voice. “You have to declare your 
rider—and send him into the jockey room soon 
if he were alive and unhurt he’d be here 

. . or he’d have wired.” 

“He may be all right,” the Colonel argued weak¬ 
ly. “He may just be cut off by a flood or—or a 
washout.” 

The rain had stopped and a patch of blue, large 
enough for the proverbial Dutchman’s breeches, 
appeared overhead. The skies were clearing, 
but as Parrish leaned on the gate of his starter’s 
box-stall, that brightening found no reflection in his 
eyes. 

Already a flood of humanity was cascading into 
the stands—early comers who would take their 
places and hold them through intervening hours; 
and now that the menace of rain was lifting, bunt¬ 
ing began to flash across the infield, and pennants 
and flags to lift their notes of colour to the fresh¬ 
ened air. 

Finally a taxicab swung free of the procession 
that moved unendingly along the cinder road and 
halted with a grinding of brake-bands before the 
Parrish barn. Its door was thrown eruptively open 
and it was an outcry of amazed relief from the girl 
that brought Parrish around, pivotting on his heels 
as Tolliver Cornett blundered out. 

He was pale and his eyes wore the haggard look 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


230 

of exhaustion. He moved somewhat stiffly, but he 
demanded with the inelegance of haste: 

“I’m in time, ain’t I?” 

Following the boy and holding his elbow came a 
strange man. 

“I’m Doctor Caldwell,” he announced briefly. 
“I was called onto the train at Winchester, and I 
brought this boy back. He was unconscious part of 
the way from loss of blood and shock and he’s still 
weak—but he insisted he had to get here and ride 
in the Derby.” 

“Can he ride?” demanded the turfman bluntly. 
“How did he lose blood?” 

“It seems he was shot somehow as the train 
pulled out of Hixon Town,” came the vague reply. 
“As to the riding, he says he can.” 

“That’s what I came for,” protested Tolliver 
hotly. “I know what I can do.” 

“What do you say, Doctor?” insisted Parrish, as 
he laid a soothing hand on the boy’s excitedly trem¬ 
bling shoulder. 

The physician eyed his inquisitor speculatively. 

“Perhaps it’s more a question for a horseman 
than a doctor, sir,” he hazarded. “He has a 
cracked rib—plastered with tape now—and he's 
lost a good bit of strength by shock and bleeding. 
It might not do him any permanent damage, but 
you’ll have a cripple on your horse.” 

“Tellygram for Colonel Parrish,” yelled a boy, 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 231 

and as the owner read its curt message: “Coming— 
Tolliver,” and passed it on to the physician, Doctor 
Caldwell explained, “I filed that at Lexington— 
hours ago. My patient insisted on it. It seems 
to have been slower than we were.” 

* * * 

The multitudes that strained the fences and 
seethed laboriously about the stands and lawns en¬ 
dured their herding with a touch of gaiety because, 
after all, the sun was shining and the brilliance of 
the occasion was flashingly superior to creature dis¬ 
comfort. Roofs and telephone poles outside the 
great enclosure bore a heaviness of human fruit, 
and to the branches of the few trees in the centre 
field black figures clung. Reporters and corres¬ 
pondents who had not missed the running of a 
Derby for years calculated the numbers and shot 
their estimates all along the range between thirty 
and forty-five thousand. 

Abruptly from the whole place rose a crescendo 
of voices that volleyed into gathering thunder and 
drowned out the brasses of the bandstand. The 
jockey board had swung up on its pivot, and over 
against Number Three for the Derby—which was 
the number that Fleetwing would wear on his sad¬ 
dle-cloth—stood the name, “T. Cornett.” 

Men who had been stampeded by doubt into 
hedging their advance bets in the hand-books now 


232 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


made a plunging drive for the pari-mutuels, to hedge 
their hedging. Then, under a Negro exercise boy, 
the colt that had made playthings out of all last 
season’s two-year-olds appeared for his warming-up 
gallop, and the shouts were reborn and followed him 
until, shining with sweat over his walnut-brown 
coat, he turned and disappeared into the paddock. 

Perhaps in that congestion there were more men 
who could not see than those who could. Certainly 
there were thousands who dared not leave their 
few square inches of standing room to venture into 
the betting sheds and chance being submerged in a 
human flood out of which only a periscope would 
avail. 

Many followed events only by sound, and at last 
they heard the bugle fanfare and the multiple howl 
which announced, “Here they come.” 

On to the sticky track where brown puddles still 
stood despite the unending toil of harrow and 
smoothing-drag came dancing the six that were left 
after the scratches. The pair of the Cartley entry 
with their blue-and-black silks came one and two— 
and it was Starflash who had drawn the rail in the 
lottery of positions at the barrier. 

Now he led the parade past the judges’ stand, 
looking the picture horse, but the stands knew that 
his grandeur would scorch itself to a cinder at the 
end of a mile in such fast company, and that the real 
issue lay between his less impressive-looking stable 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


233 

mate who wore the numeral two—and the brown 
Fleetwing that trod sedately and unexcitedly in 
third place. 

Even as a field parades deliberately to the post it 
is hard to read a jockey’s face under its peaked cap, 
but from those who had been near the Parrish stall 
in the paddock a new rumour had sprung, and now 
that rumour was running like wildfire through the 
thousands—or perhaps it was only the confirmation 
of an old fear. 

It was being whispered that “Thetaway” Cornett 
had risen from a sick-bed to ride this race, and those 
who had seen him at close quarters advertised the 
conviction that the boy had left his bed too soon. 
When he had come out of the jockey-room he had 
been ghost-pale, they said, and in the stall when 
Parrish mounted him he had moved with a sluggish 
stiffness that was not conducive to hope. His eyes 
had been dark-ringed. They even said that his 
hand, as he gathered the reins, was shaking and that 
he had looked faraway and distrait. 

Now those who pressed closest against the fence 
could confirm that report of pallor on the boy’s 
face, and through his glasses Cartley marked it and 
nodded his head frowningly. 

“The boy’s in no condition to bring home a win¬ 
ner,” he commented, “and if I win this race there’ll 
be people who’ll call it a lucky fluke.” 

Unable to bear the pressed shoulders of that 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


234 

throng or to endure its chatter, one atom in the 
great human conglomerate had slipped away from 
its place in Colonel Parrish’s box and taken up a 
stand at the far edge of the clubhouse lawn. 

Shirley stood there now with her nails pressed 
into the palms of her hands and her cheeks empty of 
their usual colour. She was dependent on no igno¬ 
rantly bandied rumours as to the condition of the 
jockey who rode the favourite. To her, the ashen 
colour of his face was no surprise, and the handicap 
he carried, of which the stewards had made no 
record, was a matter concerning which she needed 
no telling. 

Her tight-hearted terror had leaped into a vast 
and singing relief at the sight of him living, after 
she had spent a night and forenoon tortured by 
agonies of fearing that he was already dead. 

But that reaction had given way now to fresh 
alarms; fear that he might not last out the ordeal 
safely; fear that the task was after all too great for 
his strength. 

So she stood, breathing in gasps, and though her 
place was by the palings of a race-track, she was 
silently praying. 

Back of the important first three came the other 
three, the outsiders under jockeys, riding for the 
bargain-hunters who want long odds and shoot at 
the moon—horses held in contempt by the form- 
players. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 235 

Just beyond the judges’ stand the half dozen as¬ 
pirants for glory wheeled and jogged slowly back to 
the barrier that stretched a quarter of a mile from 
the finish line. As they went the fickleness of the 
herd spirit sounded in the shouts, and almost equal 
with the yells of “Oh you Fleetwing!” and “Atta¬ 
boy ‘Thetaway’ ” rose bellowed exhortations of 
“Long live the King!” and “Sock it to him, 
Earle!” 

They were at the barrier now, and down those 
two furlongs on a breeze which was northerly, 
floated the shouts of the starter. 

“Bring ’em up even boys . . . I’m not going 

to let you break ragged.” 

Behind the webbing the half dozen had wheeled 
into place and the boys were walking their mounts 
warily toward the tape, each jockeying for a shade 
the best of it in the coming eruption of horseflesh 
when the barrier should be sprung. 

As they approached, almost as warily as pointers 
closing in on a bunched covey of quail, the practised 
eye of the starter read their covetousness for first 
advantage and his monitory voice boomed. 

“Don’t try to get by me without the word. 

. . . Don’t try to beat the barrier. . . .. 

This race can’t start that way!” 

They were close now, the colts shuddering with 
explosive eagerness through their tensed muscles— 
close to the tape—and still even as a squadron 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


236 

front. Then Starflash, the quick breaker, plunged 
crazily from his place on the rail and dashed through 
the webbing, breaking the tape. 

“Bring him back, Falkes,” bellowed the starter, 
as the others began lunging with contagion of ill- 
temper, and the assistants re-stretched and re-tied 
the broken band. 

“One more break like that and I set you down ten 
days.” 

Starflash was peeved and when he was peeved his 
temper was nasty. Every time he was ridden back 
and wheeled it was to bolt on the turn and dash 
afresh at the barrier, and while Falkes wrestled con¬ 
scientiously with him, the others frothed out of that 
first quiet into a bedlam of fuming. 

“Thetaway” Cornett with the favourite was 
standing stockstill third out from the rail, and quite 
suddenly a sense of the giant importance of the race 
settled overwhelmingly over him. He knew that 
once he heard the shout “Go on”—once that statue- 
animal under him spread out into a streak of speed, 
he would forget everything else. But now, forced 
to stand there to a delayed start, a faintness came 
over him and disconcerting pains shot through his 
side and shoulders. He felt giddy and for an in¬ 
stant a foggy cloud seemed to blur and deaden the 
quick accuracy that must act and react within 
the second. For the first time, when actually in the 
saddle, he lost his self-confidence and his assurance. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


237 

For the first time his hair-trigger alertness lapsed 
into a momentary torpor. 

And still they were milling, wheeling, walking 
back and plunging forward and still that monoto¬ 
nous voice just beyond the rail was howling, “You 
can’t break that way, Falkes. Take that horse 
back, Rolf ... I tell you, you can’t break that 
way!” 

Perhaps nerve-waste and shock were telling on the 
Parrish jockey, but to the glasses trained on the 
turn it seemed that “Thetaway” Cornett was for 
once sitting listless over the brown shoulders. To 
Cornett himself the illusion seemed real that when 
all this futile wrangling ended, it would be time to 
ride. 

Then, with the suddenness of a flushed covey, 
there was a hurtling plunge forward and the barrier 
was up. The voice of authority was yelling “Go 
on!” The red flag dipped. But from the stands 
came a wail like howling out of bedlam: 

“He’s left at the post! . . '. Fleetwing’s 

left!” 


CHAPTER XIX 


I T WAS Starflash who after all his vexing efforts 
had finally succeeded in “breaking on top.” He 
was away with a good half length of lead and 
in the first half dozen strides he had amplified it. 
King George had swung in behind him on the rail 
and was letting him forge the first speed. Fleet¬ 
wing had done a thing that he had never done be¬ 
fore. Perhaps the uncanny sympathy between 
horse and boy was to blame. Perhaps the colt, too, 
had felt that a sure instinct would warn him when 
the break was to be genuine. Now he was next to 
last and unless he swung out for the long, overland 
route he could not pass that wall of horseflesh which 
interposed itself between him and the leaders. 

A stroke of mortification, almost of despair, 
burned like lightning through the mind of “Theta¬ 
way” Cornett. He had been asleep at the flag-fall. 
It would have been better to have let Button wear 
the cherry-and-white to-day. . . . But with 

that scorching flash of chagrin, all sense of physical 
inertia and pain was cauterized away, too. The 
race wasn’t lost yet. There was a mile and a quar- 
238 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


239 

ter ahead and a shade more than two minutes in 
which to redeem disgrace—and it was the order of 
the finish and not the start that counted. 

The first time past the stand Starflash was streak¬ 
ing out ahead at a pace which would have made him 
mighty had it been a pace he could hold throughout 
a journey. Some brief-lived speed-merchant which 
would presently curl up and wilt was running second, 
and the King was taking it easy in third place, under 
wraps, while Flectwing lay on the rail, fifth in a 
field of six. There was something just far enough 
ahead to pocket him and choke his fleetness into 
waste until a gap opened through which he might 
bore his way—or until his jockey saw fit to abandon 
that hope and swing him out for the overland jour¬ 
ney—which would add something like a hundred 
yards to his travels. 

On the first turn “Thetaway” was alertly ready. 
Should the boy ahead of him swing just a shade 
wide, the gate would be open and the rest would be 
easy. But that boy knew that the thing thundering 
on his saddle skirts was last year’s invincible, and he 
clung like a leech to his place of vantage close to 
the rail. 

Fleetwing was unused to this new type of punish¬ 
ment. He had been wont to take his commanding 
place at the head of the procession and to make 
sport of trailing inferiority. Now he was being 
subjected to filthy travel in slush kicked back from 


240 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


lesser hoofs. His even greatness of stride faltered 
peevishly for an instant. Huge clots of wet clay 
were hurled back plastering the chest and face of 
the colt, blinding the eyes of the boy, and those 
muddy castigations fell with the scorch and sting 
of rawhide. 

It was in the backstretch that Cornett gave up 
hope of slipping through and took Fleetwing sharply 
up until he was on humiliatingly even terms with the 
last trailer of the field. Then he set sail on the 
outside, where the route was longer but the going 
clear. 

“Now pick ’em up,” shouted the jockey to the 
son of Electron. “It’s a slavish hard task but you 
can do it,” and he took hold of the head, settled a 
shade lower over the outstretched neck and began 
flinging his mount into a lengthened stride. 

He was painfully conscious of a weakness in his 
arms that he had never felt before. Live coals 
seemed to burn with a hot agony in his chest and the 
head of the colt hung on his hands as if it weighed 
a ton and had no other support. It was near the 
far turn that the brilliant pyrotechnics of Starflash 
went dead and the colt that had cut a sensational 
speed-pattern through the heavy mud threw up his 
tail in despair and surrender. King George, who 
had been saved by his stable mate from the heart¬ 
break of running the field groggy, was ready to 
move freshly into the lead now. Jimmy Earle had 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


241 


scores to settle with an upstart who had menaced 
his prestige. Now he glanced back over his shoul¬ 
der and confidently picked his going. The moment 
of revenge had been slow in coming but at last it 
had arrived and it was sweet! The only horse he 
feared was travelling the long way and, though he 
was already moving into second place in a field that 
straggled over half a furlong, he was still a good 
ten lengths back. So they rounded the last turn, 
straightened into the stretch and bent down to ride 
home. 

Had it been another horse then, or a lesser race, 
“Thetaway” Cornett would have spared Fleetwing 
the needless heartbreak of competing that finish—• 
but it was not another horse and it was still the 
Kentucky Derby. The colt under him had never 
yet been asked to do his utmost. He had never 
yet been called on to make the supreme effort that 
seems to crack the heart and burst the lungs—the 
finish where the nerves must flog the muscles on to 
achieve the seemingly impossible. If he was great¬ 
hearted, he must show it now—and the boy must do 
no less. 

For Tolliver’s heart and lungs, too, seemed burst¬ 
ing as if under an unbearable pressure of live and 
scalding steam. His arms felt water-weak when 
they must be leather-strong, but, though King 
George was still skimming on ahead like a swallow, 
his lead was dwindling fast. Earle was already 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


242 

swinging his bat in circles that brought nome the 
lash with each stride and fell perfectly timed. Earle 
had wakened out of false security to a sudden reali¬ 
zation of oncoming danger and he had gone to the 
rawhide and to the steel. 

Fleetwing was closing with a mighty rush as the 
leader came back to him. His stride was sweeping 
in tremendous lengths. It was as if, in coming from 
behind, he had discovered a new and highly relished 
game. He was burning the mud under him, and a 
sixteenth from the wire the stands broke into a 
fresh bedlam as the brown nose reached the flank 
ahead, crept up on it, passed it, lapped on the sad¬ 
dle cloth then took the lead which was the brown 
colt’s right . . . and that Derby was over. 

It was in the chalk circle that Cornett dismounted 
but they had to wait for him. Fleetwing had 
seemed minded to make it a two-mile race and the 
arms that had unreefed his reins were too weak to 
take him up again quickly. 

The boy managed his unsaddling and managed, 
too, to hold his gear and lead pads for weighing out, 
but he was glad when he could turn them over to the 
coloured exercise boy, whose teeth were gleaming 
like a piano keyboard, and lean for a panting mo¬ 
ment against the fence. 

Tolliver looked up into the kiosk where a speech 
was being made over a silver cup and grinned depre- 
catingly by Fleetwing’s head as the brown stood 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 243 

with a horseshoe of roses about his neck. He was 
confusedly aware that J. C. Cartley was congratulat¬ 
ing him, and if he slumped a little as he rode to the 
paddock on the shoulders of his partisans, it was 
with a happiness that eclipsed the ache of his friend¬ 
ly manhandling. 

In a dining room at the Pendennis Club that eve¬ 
ning Colonel Parrish and John Powers, his trainer, 
were the honour guests of J. C. Cartley, whose car 
would later that night be coupled to an eastbound 
train. Though the trophy plate would not go with 
the host it stood filled now on his table-cloth, from 
which the food was being cleared away and over 
which cigar ends began to glow. There was a chair 
turned down there and empty, for the thoroughgo¬ 
ing sportsman who had fought out the classic and 
lost it had meant to have the boy who rode the vic¬ 
tor as a guest of equal honour with the man who had 
bred the colt and the trainer who had saddled him. 
Now Cartley, who wore his defeat as gracefully as 
he would have worn victory, rose and announced, 
“I am going to call on that Kentuckian whose day 
of triumph this is, to talk as long and as informally 
as he will of those traditions that his state has fos¬ 
tered. But particularly I’m going to ask him to 
respond to this toast—our empty chair. Gentle¬ 
men, Colonel Parrish of Woodford County.” 

The Bluegrass Kentuckian came to his feet and 
his eyes twinkled. “It’s right dangerous, gentle- 


244 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


men,” he admitted, “to take the bridle off and turn 
me loose on that topic. I’ve just come from the 
hospital where my jockey has been put to bed—and 
what I say this evening is meant to go no further. 
You gentlemen have been wondering where and why 
the boy has been kept in hiding. Now I mean to 
tell you.” 

The figures about the table bent forward but Par¬ 
rish told nothing and meant to tell nothing of one 
feature of that visit to the hospital, because that 
feature had been a matter between himself and the 
boy. There, over the cot where Tolly lay with a 
plaster cast over his cracked rib, the turfman had 
said: “Son, Mr. Cartley made you an offer that few 
men could meet and that few boys would have re¬ 
fused. He can buy me and sell me many times over 
—and yet I’m not exactly a poor man. If I had 
need to I could put my name to a check for close to 
a million. I said nothing of my intention before 
because it wasn’t necessary, but the Derby stake 
goes to you. I’m more than satisfied with the 
glory.” 

Now the speaker paused, looking around the 
faces of his fellow-diners, and his eyes twinkled, 
then grew sober again. 

“My boy was not in a hospital as report had it,” 
he said. “I didn’t know exactly where he was un¬ 
til late this morning. He was in the mountains 
where his father was murdered seven months ago 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 245 

and last night he was shot by a would-be feud assas¬ 
sin. ‘Thetaway’ Cornett, gentlemen, had run two 
long races and two hard ones before I put him in 
the saddle this afternoon. He had run a race 
through the laurel and over creek-bed mountain 
trails, pursued by a squad of armed enemies, and, 
after he had won that by an eye-lash, he had run 
another, wounded, to get here in time.” 

Again he paused, and the men to whom the cour¬ 
age of competition was a gospel, were leaning for¬ 
ward with their shirt fronts close to the table-edge 
and their cigars held forgotten in their fingers. 

“My boy came near tossing away his race to-day 
because he was too badly hurt to be entirely him¬ 
self,” went on Parrish. “That statement may come 
as a surprise to you but my next will surprise you 
more. ‘Thetaway’ Cornett won the race and has 
won other races, because he has set himself the task, 
not of earning turf fame or money for its own sake; 
not of going abroad to ride in ducal colours or the 
King’s silks—but of accomplishing a quite different 
object. His set purpose has been, and is still, to 
earn the money to hang a man, and he comes of a 
blood that doesn’t forget a love or a hatred. His 
resolution will carry him further than he has yet 
gone.” 

A murmur of astonishment came from the listen¬ 
ers and in plain but living words Parrish sketched 
the grim story of the life and death of “Old” Tolli- 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


246 

ver; of the son’s vow; of the study that went be¬ 
tween racing programmes; and of the chapter that 
had come so near a fatal ending yesterday. 

“You see now,” he added in conclusion, “why I 
refrained from binding him by contract—and why, 
had he yielded to your generous offer, Mr. Cartley, 
I would have been bitterly disappointed. I had in 
mind the conception of developing the jockey with a 
background, a law-student in the pigskin—and I 
begin to think I was less fantastic or notionate than 
one might have considered me.” 

Cartley nodded and, from his chair, hei said 
simply, “Count me in as a co-conspirator, Colonel. 
Let the boy ride for you when you have a mount for 
him and give me second call on his services when 
you can spare him. Send him up to me on Long 
Island between meets sometime, not as an employee 
but as a guest . . . and I’ll give him some 

glimpses of life from our angle. I’ll let him knock 
about the polo field and meet some lawyer friends 
of mine. A background calls for various slants on 
life, you know.” 

They toasted the owner after that and the train¬ 
er, too, and they toasted the colt, standing, and 
then the Easterner and his party made a hurried 
dash for their train. 

It was after the others had gone that Paul 
Creighton drew his old friend aside and spoke 
shamefacedly. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


247 

“Parrish,” he said, “it occurs to me that I’ve been 
a damned ass.” 

“In what particular fashion, Paul?” smiled the 
Colonel, and “King” Creighton flushed. 

“Young Cornett,” he observed drily, “was good 
enough to be invited here by Cartley as a guest of 
honour. I was here, too, but only as a sort of at¬ 
tache of yours. Young Cornett was invited to 
Long Island. But that’s all a trivial standard of 
comparison. The thing that counts is that the boy’s 
thoroughbred. He’s proved it by the acid test. I 
don’t know that he gives a damn for my opinion, 
but if he does, I wish you’d congratulate him for 
me—and tell him he can count me as his ally—to the 
finish.” 

Parrish grinned. “Go to the hospital and do 
your talking for yourself, Paul,” he suggested, 
“and if you want to make sure of a welcome, take 
Shirley with you. She’s fretting to go, but she’s 
keeping her promise and she’s too proud to ask fa¬ 
vours of you.” 

* * * 

That season, beginning with Kentucky, proceed¬ 
ing through the metropolitan circuit on to Saratoga 
and ending again at Louisville, “Thetaway” Cor¬ 
nett was conceded place as premier jockey. He lost 
many races and in some of them he finished among 
the also-rans, but if his mount was commented on 
in the notes at the foot of the form-sheet, there was 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


248 

usually some such statement as “well handled” or 
“ridden to the last ounce.” 

You know, without retelling, if you follow the an¬ 
nals of the turf, what was the spectacular record of 
the brown son of Electron and how astounding 
offers were made for him—only to be promptly re¬ 
fused. You will recall how at the end of his four- 
year-old form, and still undefeated, save for that 
first runaway, Colonel Parrish retired him to the 
stud—as the most famous horse in America’s rac¬ 
ing history. Since then old Billy Moseby has rec¬ 
ognized more than one of his progeny as they first 
appeared in spring training. 

The jockey who was unlike other jockeys because 
he was animated by a different purpose, no longer 
went in winter to Mexico and Havana. These sea¬ 
sons now belonged to his studies, and to preparation 
for new undertakings. There were evenings, too, 
by Paul Creighton’s fireside. 

The statutory amendment had become law, and 
before long Tolliver would stand in Joint Session 
room in the Louisville courthouse and be sworn in 
as a member of the Bar. The judge who adminis¬ 
tered the oath would inquire with perfunctory cour¬ 
tesy, “Any motions, Mr. Cornett?” and he would 
reply with equal gravity, “No motions, your Hon¬ 
our” and the room would twitter as it always twit¬ 
ters over this first official utterance of a fledgling 
attorney. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 249 

But the case must be prepared before the altered 
law could advance him toward the achievement for 
which he had been so long building, and it was as 
yet unready. He might ignore the perils of going 
back into the hills, but the men from whom he 
sought aid would not ignore the danger of being 
seen to traffic with him in confidence, and he had 
been baffled to the edge of despair. 


CHAPTER XX 


I N THE hills changes were working their slow 
way upward and outward. Some old alliances 
had curdled into enmities and Tom Malone, 
who had moved away from the town and built him¬ 
self a house on Staghorn, rode the highways now 
only with an escort of armed men. 

Asa Cropper, his partner in power, had died with 
his boots on: drowned in the swirl of a mountain 
torrent that had changed the bed of a fording; but 
men whispered that had he not gone that way, old 
enmities would have taken him with as great a vio¬ 
lence and almost as soon. Though Malone faced 
his world with the high chin and the smiling eyes of 
one who still feels his strength, there was an ac¬ 
knowledgment, in that escort of rifle-bearers, that 
his confidence was no longer sound at its core. 
There was another indication, too. Across the 
back of his new house, and between it and the forest- 
cloaked mountain that went up there, loomed an 
eight-foot stockade of hardwood logs. 

The house was, for that country, something of a 
mansion, fresh with the trim of new paint and bright 
with flower beds. From its front where the road 


250 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 251 

twisted shadily and the creek whispered, one saw 
these tranquil features; the martin boxes and the 
bee-gums, and, in spring, the foam of a blossoming 
orchard. But at the back was that bullet-proof 
screen, and back of that, the dark scowl of thickets 
where peril might always lurk. In going from his 
house to his barn it was Tom Malone’s custom to 
walk in the lee of that bulwark and not to expose his 
head or chest to any inimical eye that might be look¬ 
ing down unseen. Perhaps he remembered men 
who had fallen and the patience with which moun¬ 
tain vengeance can bide its time without losing its 
intensity of purpose. Perhaps he saw the changes 
creeping on at last that he had so long held in abey¬ 
ance. Perhaps he knew that, in their rising tide, 
his own power of intimidation began to strain at its 
moorings. 

Over there, some eight or ten miles away, the new 
school founded by Bluegrass women was rearing its 
little hamlet of houses like a fortress of peace, and 
children were going over there and absorbing views 
that foretold a generation of new thought. Ma¬ 
lone had done what he could to balk the coming of 
the school with its “new-fangled” teachings, but for 
once he had not been fighting men whose hearts and 
hatreds he understood. He had been opposing 
women from down below who met his rebuffs with a 
gentle but invincible stubbornness. He did not pre¬ 
cisely know how to fight them and he had been wise 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


25 2 

enough to fight them not at all except in unseen and 
devious ways. Instead he had built his stockade 
and ridden with an escort. 

Over to that new school, hardly two years old, 
yet already turning away eager pupils, were coming 
not only children but also applicants who were gray¬ 
haired, and who sought before they died to learn to 
read and write. 

They were finding a new and different sort of 
teacher here from those they had known in the old 
“blab-schools” where the master knew little more 
than his charges and where he lived as a sort of 
charity patient precariously “boarded” from cabin 
to cabin. Here were women animated by an en¬ 
thusiasm that had brought them out of civilization 
and whose mental equipment was balanced. Here 
were girls from the colleges of the East, working 
without salary—and others who had never been to 
college but who were none the less competent. 

Once again Tolliver had gone to the burial ground 
where the briars grew in choking thickness, this 
time to lay his mother beside his father, and on that 
trip Colonel Parrish and Paul Creighton had in¬ 
sisted on being his companions. They saw Tom 
Malone at a distance riding with his riflemen, but 
there was no meeting and into every eye that ex¬ 
changed glances with their own the little party from 
“down below” looked with a challenging steadiness. 
“King” Creighton’s face wore a willing scowl, and 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


253 

his bearing, for all his gray hair, had the jauntiness 
of a schoolboy who carries a chip on his shoulder. 

One might have supposed that in those steep up¬ 
lands Tolliver had no enemies. Men halted on the 
road to “make their manners” as they passed, but 
if they were adherents of the old order, they turned 
in their saddles on taking leave and rode, looking 
backward and shouting pleasantries. This was not 
for the sake of the pleasantries themselves, but that 
their gaze might not cease to be guarded until a turn 
in the road hid them from view. 

“But I came back sicker at heart than I’ve ever 
been before,” Tolliver told Shirley as they stood 
watching the sun go down over the hemp fields when 
the melancholy incident was over. “I’ve always 
thought of my task as one that waited only on the 
changing of the law, and making enough money to 
finance my prosecutions. Now I know better.” 

“Why, dear?” she asked, and the young man 
shook his head. 

“We rode out to see men who could tell enough 
and more than enough,” he declared miserably. 
“And we might as well have argued with the 
sphinx.” 

“It was because every one knew of your being 
there,” she reminded him. “You’ll have to send 
someone who’s unknown to get their evidence. 
They’re still afraid of Malone’s power.” 

“And when they stop being afraid of it,” he made. 


254 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

bitter answer, “it will be because they’re all dead—i 
and dead men can’t testify.” 

“You aren’t going to give up, are you?” she de¬ 
manded with quick fire in her voice, and her lover 
looked at her with surprised eyes. 

“Give up!” he exclaimed. “Can you ask me 
that? I don’t have to tell you, dearest, that I’m 
enlisted for the duration of the war, do I? Stop 
for a moment and think. I’ve made what would 
have looked like a fortune to me a few years ago— 
but I’ve made it all riding races. For two or three 
years more I can go on adding to that—and then 
some day I’ll step on the scales and they’ll show a 
pound or two of overweight. Then I’ll be done.” 

“Yes, I know,” she answered in perplexity, “but 
what has that to do with—avenging your father?” 

“Just this, dear,” he said quietly. “I’m work¬ 
ing a pay streak now and it won’t last. A jockey’s 
day is apt to be short. If there’d been any possi¬ 
bility of my abandoning my job—up there in the 
hills—don’t you think the temptation to take that 
one fortune I can ever count on and use it—just for 
us—would have made me waver before now?” 

“Yes,” she said. “I haven’t failed to think of 
that. But you have the names of men who can tell 
you all you need to know, and some of them are 
willing—or would be if their tongues weren’t tied 
by the dread of death. Surely a stranger could ap¬ 
proach them.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 255 

“Some of them were eager to talk to me,” he an¬ 
swered. “You could read their willingness in their 
eyes, but they only shook their heads stubbornly and 
said, ‘I dasn’t do hit, Tolly. I jest don’t skeercely 
dast,’—and there’s the blank wall.” 

He paused, and after a moment went on: “You 
suggest sending a stranger in my place—a stranger 
who wouldn’t be suspected of any connection with 
me. In any other spot on the globe that might be 
the solution. There in the hills it would fail.” 

“Why?” 

“Because in those hills, every stranger is sus¬ 
pected. Men go there only to serve definite pur¬ 
poses, and those purposes are generally distrusted. 
They go to buy rocky land for a song—and to de¬ 
velop rich coal fields, or to pry out stills and ‘peni- 
tenshery’ their owners, or to meddle in some other 
hateful fashion. The stranger, above all others,, 
carries suspicion with him—and before he can over¬ 
come it he must live their lives, talk their speech, and 
grow slowly, bit by bit, into their confidence.” 

Shirley sat on the white root of the gnarled 
sycamore. It was the spot where the boy had first 
discovered that their old childish enmity had been 
only the masquerade of love. Across to them 
through the still afternoon air came floating the 
rich voices of Negroes singing as they worked at 
their hemp-breaks. On a swell of wooded pasture 
grazed several thoroughbred mares with weanlings 


256 THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

not far from their sides. The girl nursed her knee 
in her locked fingers and for a long while she said 
nothing. 

At length she demanded irrelevantly: “Did you 
see anything of the new school while you were 
there?” 

Tolliver shook his head. “I heard a good bit 
about it,” he answered, “but it lay across the moun¬ 
tain, and I didn’t see it.” 

“They’re doing a great work,” suggested the girl, 
and the boy laughed shortly. 

“They have a slavish hard task ahead of them,” 
lie said. “In a fashion it’s as hard a job of chang¬ 
ing the unchangeable as my father undertook.” 

“And yet almost as worth while,” she insisted. 

“If they succeed,” he assented, “it will be more 
worth while.” 

Suddenly, Shirley rose from her seat and laid her 
hands on his shoulders. She looked straight into his 
eyes out of eyes that were themselves deeply earnest. 

“I’m going down to that school, Tolly,” she an¬ 
nounced. “I’m going to help with the kindergar¬ 
ten classes.” 

“You!” exclaimed Tolliver explosively. “You’re 
going to do nothing of the sort. I know those 
mountains. I was born there and I love them. No 
man who ever breathed that air gets over loving it 
and wanting it, I guess. That’s why men leave 
safety in other places to go back—and die. But 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


257 

the mountains have taken enough away from me. 
They sha’n’t take you.” 

Shirley smiled, but the resolution of her expres¬ 
sion did not fade or diminish. 

“I’ve been talking with Miss Fetter about it, 
dear,” she said. “They can’t pay much in the way 
of salaries and they have to depend on volunteers. 
She says that at first they were distrusted, too—but 
that now they’re believed in—and welcomed.” 

“I don’t see-” he began combatively, and the 

girl laughed. 

“That’s just it. You don’t see. I’m going 
there, Tolly dear, and I’m going to make good as 
a teacher—but I’m going to do something else be¬ 
sides.” 

“Something else? Isn’t that enough?” 

“Not for me. I shall be able to move about and 
go where I like. You say people have to grow 
slowly and bit by bit into their confidence up there. 
Well, I can be patient—but before I’m through, 
Tolly, dear, I’m going to bring you the evidence you 
need. I’m going to make a war of my own on the 
murder lords.” 

He stood staring incredulously at her for a full 
minute, and as he stared, her wide eyes were open 
to his scrutiny, and back of them the deep-lying cour¬ 
age and resolve of her nature. 

“You’re—you’re magnificent,” he whispered 
huskily, “but you sha’n’t do it,” 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


258 

“I’m not magnificent,” she contradicted him taunt¬ 
ingly, “and I’m going to do it” 

* * * 

Now Shirley looked up the mountain side to the 
tiny hospital which had been founded there: a hos¬ 
pital as white and clean as enamel, to which at times 
surgeons came from Lexington to hold clinics. At 
her side stood a crude but patriarchal old man who 
had given his farm as his contribution to the cause, 
and who for perhaps the twentieth time was pour¬ 
ing out his enthusiasm to her ears. 

“I want to tell ye my reasons,” he began, after 
his regular formula, “why I wanted a school here 
on this mounting. There is so many of our young 
folks growing up here not even taught up as to 
morality. It grieved me to think that parents would 
raise their children under such rulings. I see no 
chance to better hit without we teach the young 
generation that they can’t never prosper while they 
follow the old ones’ example.” 

There, reflected the girl, as she nodded her agree¬ 
ment, was the patient philosophy that Tolliver’s 
father had failed to grasp. There was the answer, 
and she was helping in her small way to accomplish 
what he had died for and died vainly. Old Uncle 
Jimmy went on in a voice that years had made trem¬ 
ulous: “I’ve been thinking about this some thirty 
years or more. Hit’s lack of knowledge and science 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 259 

that’s caused the trouble and with good teaching 
seems like they would be greatly bettered. I’ve put 
all I have into the building of the new school and 
I don’t begrudge nary a dollar I put into it.” 

“You’ve been wonderfully generous, Uncle 
Jimmy,” she assured him, and he wagged his head 
in delight, as he continued: 

“I hope our good friends will come forward and 
do all they can to help our wild mountain people 
that has been raised up here in ignorance and re¬ 
gardless of law. Their foreparents has laid a pat¬ 
tern to them of drinkin’s, killin’s, whorin’s and 
abominations in the sight of God. . . . Hit’s 

rough to say but it’s the truth and I think it ought 
to be said.” 

“And acted on, Uncle Jimmy,” she added. 

Already she was seeing avenues opening before 
her toward that other and major purpose. When 
Tolliver had become a lawyer, she would have ma¬ 
terial gathered to place in his hands—and mean¬ 
while that little hospital was treating the marooned 
and the crippled. 

* * * 

The hills were delicately aflame with rhododen¬ 
dron and down along the shaly shores of the creek 
the great magnolia-like flower of the cucumber-tree 
was spreading its white petals. The steep slopes 
were in their glory of spring and the last of the 


26 o 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


apple blossoms in Tom Malone’s orchard were 
floating down in a warm snow on the grass. 

Malone himself was preparing to ride into town 
and his bodyguard was saddling in the stable. 

As the old baron waited he saw a figure on mule 
back coming along the road and recognized Bert 
Heaton. 

Malone scowled. Bert had been fretting of late 
with anxiety lest his aging chief’s power might not 
remain strong enough to protect him. 

Doubtless he was coming now, as he had come 
before, to growl out his pessimistic fears and to be 
reassured with fair words and liquor. 

Well, there were still fair words to speak and 
there was still white whiskey in the jug. As for the 
rest, reflected Malone, a majority of the old fight¬ 
ing stock still stood at his back. 

Bert slid down from his mule and flung its bridle 
rein over a post at the stile. He came whistling 
moodily across the yard and paused to shout, “Hit’s 
Bert Heaton—an’ I’m a’comin’ in.” . . . Then 

he opened the door and entered the house. 

“Does ye know what’s goin’ for’ard?” he de¬ 
manded sullenly of Malone. “Somebody’s farin’ 
through ther mountings gittin’ tergither evidence 
fer leetle Tolliver Cornett. They’re fixin’ ter drag 
us all down below an’ hang ther kit an’ caboodle of 
us.” 

“What gives ye the idea they can do it, Bert?” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


261 


smiled the old pack leader. “I reckon I’ve got 
means of knowin’ what’s bein’ talked abroad even 
if it’s only whispered—an’ ye don’t see me frettin’ 
myself, do ye?” 

“I had speech with a man yestiddy,” averred the 
informant, “an’ he ’lowed thet old Jase Mockton 
hes done gone out West.” 

“Thet’s all right, I reckon,” admitted Tom. “I 
knew he aimed to go. I loaned him money fer 
travellin’.” 

“But this feller told me too thet Jase aimed ter 
stop off at Lexin’ton an’ tell all he knowed—and he 
knows a hell-fired lavish.” 

“Oh pshaw,” laughed the elder and wiser man. 
“I reckon you can confidence Jase. I do. Have a 
drink, Bert.” 

Bert accepted but he was not convinced, and as 
he wiped his lips on the back of his hand a member 
of the bodyguard appeared, swinging his rifle. 

“Ther ridin’ critters air saddled, Tom,” he an¬ 
nounced, and the three men went out through the 
back door, Tom cautiously keeping in the lee of the 
stockade as he made his way toward the stable. 

But Bert halted halfway between house and barn 
and laid a hand on the arm of the former county 
judge. 

“Hit won’t do ter belittle this hyar danger, Tom,” 
he urged, and as he talked earnestly he moved a 
little to one side and in the direction of the road, 


262 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


and unconsciously his companion followed him. 
Every vigilance has its moments of carelessness and 
Malone, bent on tranquillizing the fears of his hench¬ 
man, did not realize that his own slight shift of 
position had brought his head and shoulders into 
view above the edge of the stockade. For some two 
minutes perhaps he stood facing Bert Heaton, talk¬ 
ing seriously, and while he did so the masked side 
of the mountain barked twice, and twice darted out 
thin-tongued flashes of rifle-fire. 

For an instant Tom Malone stood upright as his 
face turned slowly toward the tangle with the in¬ 
jured expression in his eyes of one betrayed. Then 
his knees crumpled under him and he gave way, not 
with quick collapse but as a tree falls, swaying first 
then going down slowly. 

Bert Heaton stood cowering over the fallen fig¬ 
ure. 

“They’ve—got me,” said Tom Malone as his 
right hand gripped his pierced chest, and at the 
same moment three rifles from the yard and the 
stable door roared angrily at the laurelled hillside. 
They might as well have spurted and bellowed at 
the moon. 


CHAPTER XXI 


I T WAS to the miniature hospital at the school, 
which he had frowned upon in life, that Tom 
Malone was borne as the guttering flame of his 
life rose and fell in fitful flickering. His going was 
as picturesque and as tinged with medievalism as his 
life had been, for he made that journey across a 
mountain ridge and down creek-bed ways, borne on 
a stretcher swung from the shoulders of four men 
on foot, while two horsemen rode ahead with rifles 
balanced across their pommels, and two, similarly 
armed, protected the rear. 

Since word had travelled faster ahead, the women 
at the school were ready and the resident nurse 
waited in the hospital. A messenger, who made 
light of “right smart slavish” journeying had car¬ 
ried a telegram to Hixon, and while the wounded 
man came slowly from Staghorn a prominent sur¬ 
geon was hurrying in by rail and muleback. It was 
the gospel of that school and its small hospital to 
recognize no difference between friend and foe when 
a cry for help came, and now the stricken murder 
lord was in effect calling for help. 

Shirley Creighton had heard the news of that at- 
263 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


264 

tempted assassination as she was coming, surrounded 
by shouting children, from the outdoor class-room 
where she taught her kindergarten. A strange 
sense of unreality seized and dizzied her, and she 
paused, leaning against the friendly support of a 
towering poplar tree. About her, all unconscious 
of the import of this thing, danced these calico-clad 
children who had come in ragged and dirty from 
dark cabins. They were transformed little crea¬ 
tures, but in their veins ran this embittered blood 
that held so long and so tightly to hate. 

They had learned from her a new song and they 
were singing it. 

Almost weirdly it sounded in her ears now, for it 
was a French ballad and they, who knew no word of 
any language except the archaic English of the hills, 
long lapsed into rude dialect, were reeling off the 
words of a foreign tongue acquired merely as mem¬ 
orized sounds. 

About them reached the high summits richly and 
heavily cloaked in a score of greens splashed with 
the colour of flower bloom. Along the horizons 
lay the quiet peace of blue haze—and on the way to 
the school the man to whose undoing she had dedi¬ 
cated herself was being borne, wounded and near 
death. 

While these things were going forward other 
things were also in the doing, and back in murky cab¬ 
ins the broth of fresh war was “in ther bilinV , 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 265 

Tom Malone had been struck down and, though 
that gave fatal proof that he had enemies, he still 
had friends as well. No call was needed to those 
who remained loyal. The thing itself was a call 
and old guns were greased. From creek heads and 
far coves, a human drift set toward the school and 
that drift was a mobilization. The hills about the 
place were quiet and the children went hushed about 
their tasks and their play because a man lay, per¬ 
haps dying, in the little white house on the hill; but 
back in the tangles at night owls hooted and whip¬ 
poorwills called and some of them were human. 

Before he died the man in there would have a 
message to send out to his clan, and that command 
would be obeyed. Wrath was festering in the 
breasts of those henchmen. The chief himself had 
taken refuge in the school of the u fotched-on wim- 
men folks” but his followers were ready, at a word, 
to stand to their old principles and reopen a war of 
vengeance. They were ready to wash out, in blood, 
the infamy of that shot from the laurel—in the old 
way that would submerge these new beginnings. 

Tom Malone was the last of the strong leaders. 
With his death might have come peace—but now it 
was manifest to all whose eyes were open that it 
was the reverse which threatened. 

Shirley, unable to bring to the quieting of her ex¬ 
cited spirit even so much detachment as the other 
women in the school could summon, slipped away 


266 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


from the little settlement of houses and went to the 
road over which the stretcher must be borne in. 

Standing there slim and agitated, she waited while 
the deep peace of the spring forests seemed to smile 
scornfully at the human error of believing that ex¬ 
citement could exist under such serene skies. She 
waited for the coming of the wounded human hawk, 
thinking back on all the points of contact at which 
his life had touched and scarred that of the man she 
loved, and in touching it had bruised her own. She 
sought to let all the righteous indignation that had 
flamed against him in life die down as that life 
seemed burning out. She wondered whether his 
passing would bring to Tolliver an end of his mis¬ 
sion of punishment, or whether a successor would 
arise to fan the flames afresh. 

Then the tawdry little procession came slowly 
into view along the road. At the front rode the 
pair of armed horsemen. Behind them lurched the 
stretcher, and a glance told her that its passenger 
was insensible. Perhaps because his escort knew 
that, and knew that he was just now beyond the 
danger of being disturbed by noises, one of the rear 
guard was easing his weariness with song. Those 
on foot came wearily but doggedly plodding under 
the weight that had galled their shoulders over many 
steep and rocky miles, and the singer at the rear 
sang in the weird falsetto that the mountain minstrel 
assumes. His song was an old “ballet” of a girl 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


267 

betrayed and murdered by a faithless lover, and as 
Shirley stood looking down, the thin voice came up 
to her in its shrill minors: 

“He stobbed her ter ther heart an’ she fell with a groan. 

He threw a leetle dirt over her—an’ started fer home.” 

The injured man’s face was covered, his frame 
inert and still, and around the bend the cortege dis¬ 
appeared. Then the girl cut by a shorter way 
through the laurel, to give what help might be 
wanted at the hospital building. 

There the riflemen dismounted and the stretcher 
bearers went in, morose of feature and ungraciously 
scowling. 

When he was conscious at all, Malone lay there 
with a smoulder in his eyes which spoke nothing of 
peace. He scowled at the nurse who silently tended 
him, and he scowled at the immaculately white walls 
of the room which offered him asylum. He rarely 
spoke, but once he did and it was to say, imperiously: 
“Send fer Leetle Tolly Cornett.” 

Tolliver was at Louisville and he might not come 
in time. If he did come in time he must ride in 
through the unseen lines that were circling the place 
and ride out through them again to go away. What 
word Tom Malone had to speak to him, Shirley 
Creighton could not guess, but she knew her lover 
and knew that he would want to settle that question 


268 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


for himself. With the telegram of summons, she 
sent one of her own. It read: 

“Malone’s men are gathering. They have word to let you 
come in. I don’t know about going out again.” 

The girl had stood at the door of the small oper¬ 
ating room as the surgeon, in that armour of white 
gown, gauze-covered face, and rubber gloves, which 
she had never seen before, had probed and cut for 
the buried lead. At her side had stood a surly moun¬ 
tain man whose eyes had blazed and who brought to 
that threshold and held in his hand a rifle which he 
refused to lay aside. He was there to watch for 
his clan, and to stand guard over his chief, and 
under the sombre glare that rained out from his 
drawn brows, the surgeon worked, with his back 
turned. 

At last the physician finished and from under the 
fumes of the ether cone Tom Malone came groping¬ 
ly back to consciousness. The doctor was no longer 
in that garb which looked like the regalia of some 
sinister brotherhood, but he stood by the cot to 
which his patient had been removed. 

“I’ve done what I could,” he said, “but it’s not 
enough. You have faced death before now, Ma¬ 
lone, and I take it you want straight talk. If you 
have any matters to settle, you had better attend 
to them.” 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 269 

Tom Malone looked up from his pillow and the 
old bland smile did not come to his face. It was 
grim now and sphinx-like. 

“I ain’t ready to say anything just yet,” was his 
curt reply. “How long have I got?” 

The surgeon shook his head. “A day or two, 
perhaps—hardly more.” 

“Mebby they’ll be enough,” answered Malone and 
turned his face toward the wall. 

He lingered two days and it was on the second 
that “Thetaway” Cornett pushed his way through 
the hill roads from Hixon Town. He rode with his 
eyes before him and with a heavy heart. His enemy 
was escaping him unpunished by the shame of the 
gallows. His enemy had sent for him and such a 
death-bed summons could not be ignored—yet it 
was quite within the possibilities that, even in this 
last gesture, was the setting of a trap. 

That enemy might offer his hand at the end—and 
Tolliver could not take it. Then when he turned 
his face outward again, if that enemy so decreed it, 
he might fall. 

As he drew near the school he saw solitary sen¬ 
tinels now and then looking down from steeply 
sloping corn fields, and each of them nursed a rifle 
cradled across his forearm. More than once in 
the final miles a figure stood out suddenly from the 
laurel into the road, holding a cocked rifle at the 
ready and, glaring silently at him, waved him on. 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


270 

He knew that all this ceremony was to impress 
him with a recognition of how tight the lines had 
been drawn and how ready they were to strangle 
him. He never acknowledged any of these un¬ 
friendly salutations. Instead he rode past them 
with a scornfully straight-gazed look to the front 
and at length he slid from his saddle at the school, 
and found Shirley in his arms. 

“I’d almost built the case solid,” she whispered 
breathlessly. “I’d ridden back into the hills and 
talked to people and gotten their promises—and 
then this happened.” 

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “it may serve the 
same purpose.” 

“Not if the war breaks out afresh,” gasped the 
girl. “He’s lying up there hatching all sorts of 
things—and his crowd is just waiting. I’m afraid 
—I’m horribly afraid”—she broke off and clung to 
him—“that you can’t go out safe—if—if he sends 
out a battle call!” 

The boy, who was now a man, gently took her 
hands from his shoulders. “I must go in to him, 
now, dear,” he said, “or it may be too late.” 

Shirley led him into the room, and now two rifle¬ 
armed men stood there by the bed. Tolliver’s 
guide went out and closed the door, leaving only the 
man in the bed, his pair of henchmen, the nurse— 
and Tolliver. 

Slowly the dying man looked up and his gaze met 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


271 

that of the boy who had come a long way to hear 
him speak. In neither pair of eyes was there any 
sign of faltering. 

“I’ve been waitin’ for you,” said Malone in a low 
voice that came painfully. “I’ve done kep’ myself 
alive two days—jest waitin’.” 

“I came like as if I was travellin’ with borrowed 
fire,” answered young Cornett, quite unconscious- 
that he fell here, after all this time, into the phrases 
of the wilderness. “I couldn’t come any faster.” 

A blaze shot gustily and briefly into eyes on the 
pillow. 

“Ye don’t get to hang me after all,” came the de¬ 
fiant announcement. “No Malone ever died that 
way yet.” 

“No,” came the equally defiant retort, “but it 
took death to cheat me.” 

“Out there,” went on Tom Malone, “I’ve still 
got friends. They’re waitin’ for some word from 
me. Moreover, they’re ready to heed it. I won’t 
be dead long before they’ll be about whatever work 
I leave for my bequest.” 

“I know that—and in spite of knowing it I came 
when you sent for me.” 

Very slightly the head on the pillow inclined it¬ 
self. 

“God made these hills,” gasped Malone, “and I 
reckon He didn’t make them for a trash-yard to 
hell. . . . I’ve had time to think as I laid 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


272 

. . . here ... I had your pap kilt . . . 

The men I hired were just servants . . . Bert 

Heaton fired the gun ... an’ he betrayed me, 
too . . . He’ll be dead to-night.” 

The voice subjected to so much strain and excite¬ 
ment broke in a sort of strangle, and the boy at the 
side of the bed stiffened as his features twitched, 
then tautened. The colour went out of his cheeks 
but he said nothing. Malone braced himself and 
his voice came again audible but faint. 

“I’m goin’ to face judgment now . . . where 

I ain’t got no undue power . . .” He forced out 
the words: “Leave the rest to God, son.” 

Tolliver bent forward: 

“What message do you send out there—to 
them?” he demanded fiercely. 

“Yes,” answered Malone. “I’ve got ter send it 
soon. I ain’t got long now.” Again he broke off 
and lay breathing hard as if gathering his shreds of 
strength. Then suddenly he half rose on an elbow 
and turned his face toward his henchmen. In a 
final spurt his voice shot upward into something like 
the ring of command. “Boys, tell ’em to quit it!” 
He gave the imperious order. “Tell ’em thet’s my 
last word . . . damn it all . . . quit it!” 

The old feud leader fell back on the white sheets. 
He sought to raise his hand in some final gesture, 
but his strength had spent itself and he lay power¬ 
less. The two armed men set down their guns 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


273 

noiselessly against the wall and lifted him. One of 
them said: “He’s done passed out.” 

After a little the other henchman turned to Tol¬ 
liver and extended a hand. “I didn’t hev no part 
ner parcel in yore pap’s killin’, son,” he said. “I 
reckon ye kin afford ter strike hands with me and let 
folks breathe easy.” 


CHAPTER XXII 


HAT same day, in a “stable-barn” on a 



creek not far from the school, Bert Heaton 


JL was talking with Joe Crumbo. Though 
they had seen to it that no one overheard what they 
had to say, any listener-in might have recognized at 
once that a spirit of complaint sounded through 
Heaton’s words. 

“Ye didn’t hev no license ter botch ther business 
like ye did, Joe,” he snarled accusingly. “Hit war 
a straight shoot down ther hillside, an’ a man thet 
enjoys yore repute with a rifle-gun hed ought ter 
hev made hit a sure deadener.” 

“Thet’s right,” retorted Crumbo hotly. “Put all 
ther dirty work up ter me an’ then go faultin’ me 
fer not killin’ him outright. Hit war you thet fell 
down—not me, Bert. We’d done talked hit all 
over from A to izzard an’ yore part of ther job war 
ter beguile him out beyant ther log wall, whar I 
could get a plain sight on him. Ye shilly-shallied 
’round till I had ter shoot when thar warn’t no 
handy chanst ter sight on his heart. I reckon yore 
nerve kinderly failed ye.” 

“Failed me, hell! Tom Malone don’t w’ar no 


274 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


275 

dunce-cap. Ef I’d sought too hard ter beguile him 
out in ther open, he’d ’a’ suspicioned me straight¬ 
away. I reckon ther job war good enough, though 
—an’ hit warn’t undertook none too soon nuther. 
I’m confident he war fixin’ ter double-crost us.” 

“Bert,” the actual assassin’s face clouded un¬ 
easily, “ye don’t reckon he does suspicion ye, does 
ye? Nobody else wouldn’t make shift ter fathom 
hit—but he’s been layin’ thar studyin’ an’ meb- 
by-” 

Heaton started violently and cold sweat beads 
came out on his forehead, but he laughed uneasily. 

“He hain’t got no license ter suspect nuther one 
ner t’other of us, Joe.” 

“I heered a thing a leetle spell back thet’s kind- 
erly made me feel oneasy, though, Bert.” 

“What war hit?” 

“I heered he’d done sent fer leetle Tolly Cornett. 
Supposin’ them two makes peace—an’ Malone tells 
him what he knows a’ready? Sometimes a feller 
acks queer when death comes nigh ter him.” 

For a moment the eyes of the underling, whose 
conscience staggered under so appalling a weight, 
stood staring ahead of him, seeing ghosts. At 
length he repeated dully: “He’s done sent fer Tolly 
Cornett? Ther hell ye say!” 

After a while, Bert turned abruptly on his heel, 
and his companion demanded anxiously, “Whar are 
ye agoin’ ter?” 



THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


276 

“I’m goin’ after my rifle-gun an’ a pocket-full 
of hulls—ter finish ther job,” came the eruptive 
reply. 

“ ’Pears like we hain’t done hit all yit. I’m goin’ 
over thar ter thet damn fotched-on school . . . 

ter git Tolly Cornett . . . like I got his daddy 

afore him.” 

* * * 

There was an old foot-bridge made of the squared 
giant of a log, spanning a trickle of whispering 
water a hundred yards from the edge of the school 
enclosure. A hand rail graced one side, and about 
it rose moss-covered boulders of titanic proportion 
topped and masked by waxen green rhododendron 
growth, and spattered with the warm pink of clus¬ 
tered bloom. On either side rose precipitous slants 
of hill, so thickly wooded that the flecks of sunlight 
sifted brokenly through shadow there. 

It was a place for lovers, a place of enthroned 
beauty, and it was there that Shirley asked, with lips 
made tremulous by anxiety: 

“What did he say? What was his last word?” 

Tolliver slipped his arm about her. His own 
face was still set from that last interview with Ma¬ 
lone, and his eyes were still hard from self-restraint. 

“He sent out word to his men to—quit it!” came 
his slow reply. “He said I might leave the mat¬ 
ter to God.” 


277 


THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

“Then your task-?” 

“My task of punishment is over-” He broke 

off and suddenly caught her in his arms. As if that 
aspect of the matter had only at this instant dawned 
on him, he stood looking incredulously into her eyes. 

“Do you realize what that means?” he suddenly 
demanded. “It means that all I’ve made can go to 
a less grim use. It means that it’s ours—not a trust 
fund for death, after all, but our own—for life!” 

The girl’s hands were on his shoulders. Abrupt¬ 
ly their fingers tightened there and her face paled. 
Her eagerness died to the tautness of sudden dread. 

“Don’t move,” she whispered. “I heard a rustle 
there in the brush. . . . Someone’s slipping 

along. Let me get in front of you.” 

He held her where she was and laughed. 

“Yesterday,” he said, “There might have been 
something to fear. Not to-day.” 

As if putting an ironic period to his words, the 
quiet was blasted into violence by the crash and the 
reverberating echoes of rifle fire. It rolled and 
stuttered among the giant rocks and trailed off, 
softened, through the trees. 

Shirley screamed and clutched more spasmodic¬ 
ally at Tolliver’s shoulders, then as she saw that 
he was still standing—seemingly unhurt—the terror 
of her eyes gave way to mystification. 

They stood for a few moments intently listening, 
and then Tolliver said soberly: “I think someone’s 




THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


278 

been shot. I hear him stirring and groaning—just 
over there. Wait here while I see.” 

But she did not wait. She followed, clinging to 
him as he pushed his way through the twined and 
tangled stubbornness of the rhododendron—and she 
was with him as he came to a body that lay there, 
with fresh blood dribbling out from its punctured 
chest. 

Tolliver bent down and laid a hand on the heart. 
It was still. The groan he had heard had been 
final—but by the outstretched and inert hand, which 
lay with fingers turning upward, was a rifle, cocked 
but not yet fired. 

“It’s Bert Heaton, Malone’s right-hand man,” 
murmured the girl in a gasping voice. “I’ve seen 
him twice before. One of the things I learned was 
that he fired the shot at your father.” She broke 
off then with a shocked conviction, and exclaimed: 
“He came here to kill you, too, Tolliver.” 

The young man nodded his head. 

“I’d forgotten,” he answered. “So many im¬ 
pressions were hammering at my brain. Tom Ma¬ 
lone told me that Heaton killed my father, and that 
he’d betrayed him, too. He said, though the words 
didn’t carry full meaning to me then—‘He’ll be 
dead to-night.’ ” 

Shirley shuddered and covered her face with her 
hands to shut out the terrible grimness of the pic¬ 
ture presented by that prostrate body, dad in mean 





THE ROGUE’S BADGE 


279 

nondescript garments; of the face twisted into a 
fixed stamp of frustrated rage; the hand lying open 
by a cocked gun; the figure of the assassin, himself 
assassinated on the verge of his crime. 

Life had gone out of the face, leaving it already 
grotesque, yet quickness had so recently tenanted it 
that the blood still dripped from the pierced chest 
and spread as it soaked down into the lush grass. 

“He thought he was shadowing me,” whispered 
Tolly slowly, as he lifted the dusty hat and laid it 
over the twisted face. “He thought so and he was 
—but he didn’t know that he was being shadowed 
too.” 

“Take me away from here,” pleaded Shirley as 
she began to tremble from head to foot. “I don’t 
believe I shall ever be able to look at rhododendron 
again.” 

He slipped his arm around her. “The mountain 
folk call it ‘la’rel,’ ” he reminded her, “and the 
thickets where it grows, they speak of as ‘la’rel 
hells.’ ” 

* * * 

It was spring again, and the Bluegrass country 
was freshly green where two young people stood 
watching the framework of a house rising in a 
woodland of walnut and oak. 

“It looks like it would be a pretty fair sort of 
house,” said the young man. “I wonder if you’ll 










28 o THE ROGUE’S BADGE 

let me come in the door without asking what I 
want?” 

“I hope I’ll know,” laughed the girl. “I hope 
I’ll know you want me.” 

He looked into her eyes, not down into them—for 
he was still no giant—but also not up, for neither 
was she. 

“Let’s go over to the Colonel’s,” he suggested. 
“He ’phoned this morning that Lady Creighton has 
a foal at her side—a son of Fleetwing that’s eligible 
for the Futurity.” 











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